The absurd as normal: why megaprojects are decadent

The idea of absurdity as befitting the dramaturgy of everyday experience is hardly new. Barzan builds on the legacy of the existentialist thinker Camus (1942, 2013), whose assessment of the human situation as essentially absurd and devoid of purpose was epitomized by the myth of Sisyphus, forever rolling a boulder up a mountain. Barzan (2000) is interested in the normalization of futility, absurdity and acceptance of states of affairs. That one might describe major projects as futile and absurd might initially strike the reader as odd, but it ought not to. It is not that megaprojects themselves are futile and absurd, but that their project management is, if we define good project management as bringing projects in on time, budget and scope. There is good data to suggest that this is not often the case. Flyvbjerg (2003) writes that large-scale projects consistently experience cost overruns, delays and benefit shortfalls, despite repeated efforts to improve planning and management. If we are to judge an order as decadent, using historian Barzan’s (2000) criteria, the acceptance of the futility of bringing major infrastructure projects in on time, budget and scope seems close to a theatre of the absurd. Flyvbjerg’s (2003) detailed case studies and statistical analyses reveal a persistent pattern of project failure, offering both critical insights and suggestions for reform in project management practices. These are summed up in Flyvbjerg and Gardener’s (2023) book, a book written to popularize what Flyvbjerg (2017) had called “the iron law of project management”, as well as how to deal with this iron law. The iron law states that, probabilistically, with a few exceptions, megaprojects will invariably be “over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over again”.

What is to be done? When things don’t turn out as predicted, anticipated or promised, Flyvbjerg stresses reasons of politics and psychology, both of which I will maintain, in the way that they are constituted as arguments, add to academic decadence in Barzan’s terms. Project management keeps on practising the same practices, and these same practices, when applied in mega-infrastructure projects, invariably lead to people accepting “futility and the absurd as normal”. It is this acceptance and persistence in practising practices that do not do what they are supposed to do that defines the culture of megaproject management as decadent, in Barzan’s (2000, p. xvi) terms.

The few exceptions to the iron law of megaprojects failing over and over again, readers of Flyvbjerg and Gardener (2023, p. 173) will find, are projects for solar, wind power, thermal energy transmission and road infrastructure. These are not decadent in two ways: first, in terms of repetition of failure to meet specifications and inability to learn and improve from one project to the next, and second, they do not denote the failure of academics interested in projects to produce definitive advice to repair persistent project underdelivery. The reason that they are not, the argument goes, is because these are essentially projects based on repetitive routines, modular in nature, doing repetitions of the same thing, often assembling items already fabricated, such as solar panels and batteries, wind turbines, power lines and cables, laying kilometres of asphalt or, if you are lucky enough to live in Iceland, obtaining your heat from capturing naturally occurring thermal energy. For the rest, the megaprojects in Flyvbjerg’s database are a “fat tail” of failed expectations – failed, that is, in terms of the initial project perceptions. The biggest failures are all one-off megaprojects such as “storage of nuclear waste, hosting the Olympic games, construction of nuclear power plants, building information technology systems and constructing hydroelectric dams” (Flyvbjerg and Gardener, 2023, p. 173).

Some lessons are learnt from this litany of failures, repeated at length in Flyvbjerg and Gardener’s (2023) book. These are to plan slow, act fast and modularize wherever possible. Well, this is clearly a recipe for success where repetition, routines and the same standing conditions for the construction of an open system are in place. The problem is that in the fat tail, these are not in place. In all the material projects involving land and water, the topographical conditions will always be unique. That eliminates projects that include bridges, dams, pipelines, mining, tunnelling, etc. It also excludes innovation projects, which deal with bringing into being that which does not exist, for instance, in industries such as IT, defence, aerospace, etc. Those at the foot of the fat tail are the riskiest place of all in which to be managing a project, crowding in on nuclear power, the ultimate “loser”. Mega megaprojects, hugely risky, rarely turn out nicely.

To avoid what I have termed decadence, Flyvbjerg says one should plan slowly to be able to execute rapidly. Failure to do this is what Kahneman and Tversky (1979) called the “planning fallacy”. The argument comes from psychology. The planning fallacy is premised on a cognitive bias with which people consistently underestimate the time, costs and risks involved in completing tasks while overestimating the benefits and overall success. Despite past experiences that might indicate otherwise, individuals, they argue, tend to be overly optimistic about their future performance. Optimism bias is a cognitive phenomenon where individuals or groups systematically underestimate the likelihood of negative events and overestimate positive outcomes. In other words, the argument is that people tend to be overly confident about the success of their plans or projects, often underestimating costs, timelines or risks while overestimating benefits and positive impacts (Kahneman, 2011). This bias can lead to significant planning errors, as seen in large-scale projects where initial estimates often prove to be empirically falsified in practice. In the field of project management, optimism bias is frequently cited as a key factor behind cost overruns, delays and benefit shortfalls. It is closely related to the planning fallacy, in which people neglect adequately factoring in historical data or real-world obstacles when making predictions about future performance.

Flyvbjerg argues that optimism bias’ “strategic misrepresentation” is endemic to megaprojects. That is, to gain support and consent for a project, the sponsors will typically “deliberately and systematically distort or misstate information for strategic purposes” (Flyvbjerg and Gardener, 2023, p. 26). In other words, “optimism bias” enables what social scientists call “strategic ambiguity” to be cultivated (Jarzabkowski et al., 2010; Leitch and Davenport, 2003; Davenport and Leitch, 2005). Strategic ambiguity is a political ploy to leave room for manoeuvre when things don’t work out as planned, as is invariably the case with all but the exceptional modular megaprojects. According to Flyvbjerg, it is the planning fallacy’s optimism bias and project sponsors’ commitment to strategic ambiguity that makes megaprojects, in Barzan’s (2000) terms, routinely “decadent”. Maintaining strategic ambiguity about a project facing the great unknowingness of all the events that will happen before realizing its future perfect (Clegg et al., 2006; Pitsis et al., 2003) assumes that present projections about what the future will turn out to be are right on the day. The evidence suggests that is rarely the case.

These theoretical accounts of megaproject failure are akin to Wittgenstein’s (1953) “language games”. They communicatively constitute a branch of project studies that disagree, with family resemblances, about the reasons for megaproject failure. Language games only make sense in terms of their embeddedness within broader patterns of human activity, culture and social interaction that Wittgenstein called forms of life. Language games make sense only against the backdrop of shared practices, assumptions and ways of interacting with the world. Wittgenstein (1953: §309) wrote that the aim of philosophy was to “shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle”. Allegorically, these debates in project studies are akin to a series of flies buzzing around in a fly bottle, trapped. The trapped flies are akin to the endless debates between different exponents of accounts of megaproject failure. These debates are misunderstandings about how words work, held captive by a certain picture or analogy, by taking words out of their ordinary context (their “language game”) and asking questions that seem profound but are actually based on grammatical confusion. These “bewitchments of our intelligence by means of language (Wittgenstein, 1953: §109)” lead to the postulation of casual accounts of states of affairs that, on inspection, can be freed from the language games in which they are entrapped. The first trap is to assume that projects are akin to experiments conducted in closed systems in which prediction of consequences will flow from following instructions – or planning – carefully. As I shall subsequently explain, the second trap is to use as explanations things that make no sense when their causality is deconstructed, because the causality espoused is tied up in the language games being played, which do not match conditions of existence. In this way, decadent ritual accounts are produced.

The first trap is to be aware that if projects were always to meet their prescribed budgets, temporality and specifications, then we would clearly be writing, as project studies scholars, about a world in which prediction was more perfect. Even in the best laboratory situations, prediction is not always perfect; an error in the experimental setup that destabilizes the standing conditions can ensure that an experiment does not go to plan. In the laboratory, most aspects of an experiment can be controlled in principle; in a project, whether it is an infrastructure or IT project, they cannot. While the former can, at best, approximate a closed system, the latter cannot. Projects, according to Schütz (1967), are fundamentally future-directed. As Whyte et al. argue, projects are exercises in future-making (Whyte et al., 2025; Comi et al., 2025). The most interesting thing about the future is that it is unknown. We may plan and build scenarios, but they can neither predict nor ensure a future. They are a conception or anticipation of a future state of affairs that an actor or actors intend to bring about through their actions by means of plans or designs for that action conceived before the action is completed, usually before it begins. Projects are a throwing forward of imaginations and resources into an unknown future. How well can we anticipate that expectations about what that future might hold will be confirmed? In an open, rather than a closed, system, they are probably not perfect. If it is an open system projected forward for several years, it will be open to sociopolitical turbulences, abrupt changes of political direction creating instability; topographical and subterranean variations in terrain and technologies that are complex, expensive and unpredictable in their applications, as well as being dependent on innovations not yet made that, if they arrive on time, will probably be most imperfect.

Of course, it is the case that, often with the best of intentions, there will be opportunities to minimize uncertainty by contracting specifications for as many variables entailed in the project as precisely as legal expertise will allow, but events will happen, regardless. Tunnel-boring machines will get stuck or break down in situ; hard rock will be encountered; “hard rain” (Dylan, 1963) will occur with an ensuing litany of desperate encounters. Progress will be slowed; unstable politics will be innovated by unstable politicians espousing foolish theories about the ways that economies operate; tariffs will become unpredictable and interest rates will change, making projects way more expensive than anticipated when contracts were arranged, etc. Events, the unknowns, have a habit of occurring where least expected, shredding well-laid plans and dissolving project strategies on encounter with unexpected sociomaterialities.

The second trap to be loosened to release the metaphorical fly from the fly bottle is to ask why project academics keep arguing for rival accounts of why failure happens, yet things seem not to improve. Why does the field of project management and the management of megaprojects continue to be so decadent? By this I mean, why does it continue in its repetition of project knowledge, the body of which is daily disconfirmed by major megaproject infrastructure ventures and events in and around them? Why is there relative sclerosis in both private and public sector institutional approaches to deliver projects and megaprojects? Why do future-making projects routinely tend not to deliver on expectations contracted at the outset?

These are valid questions. Asking them highlights those projects that Flyvbjerg sees failing repeatedly. A recent volume, edited by Ika and Pinto (2025), comprising a Handbook of Project Behaviour, addresses these issues through considering rival theories of project failure. Many of these failures will be familiar to readers of this journal – for instance, in America, the California High-Speed Rail project (Lin, 2021) and the failed Apple car project; in the UK, the debacle of the HS2 project, recently dissected by Winch (2025) as well as the Crossrail project (Chiponde et al., 2024). Of course, there are many more global projects that could have been enumerated, with narratives of some of them collected in a special issue of Les Cahiers de la recherche architecturale urbaine et paysagère in 2021. As the editors write, we should not “neglect the ordinary frictions”, which undermine the credibility of a project, leading to a progressive derealization of the feasibility conditions, an observation with which one is in accord. The “ordinary frictions” are not uppermost in the account of various “sleights of hand” that preoccupy Ika and Pinto (2025). The debate about these different sleights of hand begins with Kahneman and Tversky’s (1979) “planning fallacy” and Hirschman’s “hiding hand” (Hirschman, 1967).

We have already encountered the planning fallacy in Flyvbjerg’s endorsement of optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation as causes of project decadence. To recapitulate, optimism bias occurs when project sponsors, displaying all the optimism of an ocean-going tadpole, imagine that the risks they face are not as great as probability premised on past practices warrants. Strategic misrepresentation of cost and benefit estimates to a bet on getting the project started, with the consequences subsequently, once it is underway. By contrast, the hiding hand hypothesis argues that projects are practical experiments in which creativity and innovation, when confronted with inevitable planning and execution errors, can triumph and produce a positive and memorable outcome.

Two other sleights of hand are considered: the passive hand, by which decision-makers seek to stifle creativity and avoid risks, and the protecting hand, premised on a precautionary principle exemplified by the use of risk management and scenario planning. Underlying these theoretical approaches are a number of what, adapting Merton (1968), might be called middle-range practices of rational decision-making, largely derived from the economics literature, a field in which the issues that create “bounded rationality” (Simon, 2000) to bedevil projects in the real world are assumed away by modelling. More recently, accounts of heuristics that presuppose bounded rationality have emerged (Ika et al., 2022; Gigerenzer, 2020).

In the theatre of events (Islam, 2016) that are project processes, rituals of project management are performed, constituted by all the measures assumed to manage the grounds of “risk” or “uncertainty”. These include, according to Ika and Pinto (2025), the following: checklists; weighted scoring models; analytic hierarchy process; choosing by advantages; cost-benefit analysis; net present value; internal rate of return; stochastic criteria-based evaluation techniques such as decision trees and risk-based profitability analysis; deterministic planning techniques such as decision gates, work breakdown structure and critical path analysis; stochastic planning techniques such as expected monetary value, risk sensitivity analysis, program evaluation and review techniques and reference class forecasting. An intriguing question arises as to why these project practices are continually deployed as methods that patently do not work to achieve their aim of bringing megaprojects in on cost, on schedule and to specifications (Flyvbjerg and Gardener, 2023)?

These accounts all presuppose a form of ritual that is paradoxical in that events regularly occur that the rituals are supposed to forestall. The paradoxical condition characteristic of these contemporary project management practices is that they will ward off the unknown through ritual in ways that are strikingly similar to anthropological accounts, for example, those of Azande witchdoctors by Evans-Pritchard (1937). As is the case in the Azande, key decision-makers' practices may be thought of as rituals to ward off uncertainty and reassure faith in the community of project practice that, this time, this megaproject, with these ritual routines in place, will not fail. These symbolic practices hold a sacred place in the secular rituals of project management. They are devices to forestall whatever will happen. That this will be something unexpected will frequently be the case. Resources will be invested in establishing project management arrangements that rely on project management bodies of knowledge to address unknowable events in advance of their occurrence, even though these events can only ever be known after they occur. In the face of unknowable and unpredictable events, how can these rituals cope with “unknown unknowns”? They cannot, nor is that their function.

Their function is to produce legitimation through repeated routines despite their legitimacy constantly being eroded by their failure in practice. Nonetheless, they provide a structured sequence of actions that can give individuals the illusion of control in an unpredictable world. These rituals consolidate professional identity; this identity is achieved by doing project managing, being a project manager. Rituals serve to manage uncertainty and ensure a sense of control and cohesion by imbuing meaning retrospectively into unforeseen events as “exceptions”. As Durkheim (1915) argued, rituals reinforce social solidarity. In the megaproject management case, the solidarity of professional identity in the repetition of practices makes project failures more bearable. It does so by embedding them as exceptions within a ritual repertoire of practices designed to ward off failures, that successful outcome so frequently missed.

The world of major projects is paradoxical in that project failure in terms of cost, schedule and benefits happens repeatedly, not, one would suggest, because of a conspiracy of bias making for bad planning or error in delivering otherwise sound plans, as the planning fallacy suggests, but because such projects have innate risks that even the best planning and project management cannot predict. All projects suffer from a lack of human omniscience or its obverse, an abundance of human ignorance. Project management theorists, aware of this lack of omniscience and abundance of ignorance, postulate that agents involved in projecting projects are said to engage in “optimism bias”. Bias is an abstraction that depends on a conception of statistical deviation from a norm. In the case of projects, the norm is an abstraction as well; it is not empirically based, other than in the five exceptional cases. Abstractions are built on abstractions. Meanwhile, in the real world of sociomaterial events, things change, drifting the project away from its initial symbolic constitution and creating new significance, symbols and meanings. While bias can always be assigned to these changes post hoc, there is one big problem.

Attribution of optimism bias cannot be known other than by retrospection that attributes it to outcomes that do not correspond to those projected, an attribution that cannot be empirically tested because its causal mechanism is defined as agential intentionality. It is only when there is a lack of correspondence between plans and project outcomes that bias enters the picture as an account of project failure. Absent the latter, the former will not be accounted. The latter is essentially unknowable other than through the agent’s retrospective accounts. These accounts cannot index intentionality as a prior causal mechanism because there are no reliable measures or indicators of this intentionality available at the outset. Bias becomes a retrospective account for why things did not work out as planned; it is an available account, no more and no less, a heuristic founded on available project accounts (Wenzel and Stjerne, 2021).

When the future unfolds in ways that are not anticipated, a post hoc causal account of optimism bias, bereft of any empirical causal markers, other than those of recurrent decadence, can be marshalled as an available account. One thing that seasoned project managers share is a considerable degree of project-based experience in which they have been party to practices of much project organizational storytelling (Boje, 2014). Experienced project managers and leaders can draw on their cache of stories to make sense of what happen and what does not (Drouin et al., 2021). A heuristic taps into everyday theorizing, everyday storytelling and the stuff of lived experience. A project may be constituted by a communication system of planning, contracting and engaging, but all this is put in place, usually, long before projects unfold in ways that involve complex technical rationalities and sociomaterialities that are brought into being by the project as real and fallible. It is then, post hoc, that available accounts are marshalled. At best these are rationalizations masquerading as theory; at worst, they are not worthy of the name “theory”. They fail Popper’s (1959) test of falsification because there are no measures of cognitive bias a priori, and the explanation is only marshalled post hoc for projects that failed to meet documented expectations. The lack of falsifiability of the theory is akin to that of psychoanalytic theories, such as repression or sublimation, which are so flexible they could explain any observed human behaviour after the fact, as is the case with cognitive bias.

It is events that disrupt schedules, delay works and demand improvisations over organization, as pre-planned behaviours. “Organization, no matter the extent to which it is organized, cannot eradicate its other: improvisation. An organizational world without improvisation would be devoid of events: those unpredictable things that happen” (Cunha et al., 2016). Projects attempt system closure on their organization, despite being in a resolutely open field in which “events” (Deroy and Clegg, 2011) occur, through extensive documentation of prior planning. Such events as occur are not errors; to see them as such suggests they are a deviation from what was expected, for which some agency may be held responsible. Events are the irruption of unknown unknowns, whose meaningfulness confounds the immediacy of not knowing they would be manifest and the problem of determining which symbolic framework should be used to process them. Any megaproject is a clash between an attempt at system closure and events that will disrupt the closed system conjured. Conjuring does not always create the appropriate illusion, and there may be many contingent events that serve to create disillusion. We should expect that such disillusion is likely to be the case with large complex projects with many stakeholders interpreting the symbols and significations that constitute the project in which many events, of the “unknown unknowns” variety, are anticipatable as disruptors of the assumptions of the closed system.

Some events will be material; others will be social, as per the indexicality of contractual interpretation (Clegg, 1975, 2013). These events are political, emerging around the thousands of documents that constitute the project and its contractual documents. The more complex the codification of these, the greater the probability of collective sense-making being disrupted, creating deliberate deviations from others’ interpretation of plans in the project. Counterfactually, the more complex the codification, the more fragile it becomes because there are many more opportunities for potential indexicality in interpretation (Garfinkel, 1967; Clegg, 1975, 2013), many more variables over which control is assumed and many more occasions for interested parties’ interests not to align. As Taleb (2012) argues, more simply coded systems beat more complexly coded systems because the former provide more room for manoeuvre, learning, innovation and recovery when events cause deviance and disruption. Contractual documentations provide a key opportunity for the politics of indexicality to flourish in projects, as differently organizationally interested parties can strive to exploit indexically their interpretations of these documents to press specific advantages from these documents.

Megaprojects are decadent in the terms that I have outlined because of three major factors. First, there is the impossibility of creating closure in an open system, a system open to all sorts of sociomaterial and sociopolitical events, creating unknown unknowns. Changes in interest rates, the disruption of supply chains through pandemic or the politics of tariffs, the impact of natural disasters, the occurrence of unanticipated events, supply bottlenecks and staff shortages, strikes and standover tactics by organized labour, etc. I could go on, but the point is that there are many opportunities for the assumptions upon which contractual closure of the variables that are controllable in an open system project are based to be voided. Outside of laboratory conditions that are tightly controlled closed systems, stuff will happen and events will occur that register as unanticipated unknown unknowns. Projects, as Kreiner (2020) argues, are practical experiments in bringing something into being, with no guarantees.

Second, in projects sometimes serendipity will occur (Cunha et al., 2015), but other times, zemblanity (Giustiniano et al., 2016) ^[1]. In either case, a degree of randomness is likely. Flyvbjerg and Gardener (2023) may advise that we should plan slowly and act fast, but unfortunately, as General von Moltke (1880) advised, “no plan survives contact with the enemy”, with the enemies of project order in the real world being innumerable and often entirely unexpected and uncontrollable. Events, by their nature, are unpredictable, emphasizing the need for adaptability and flexibility. Project management practices of various kinds can make for better planning, but they cannot plan to eradicate zemblanity any more than they ensure serendipity. They can provide greater confidence in preparedness, functioning, in part, as a form of ritual to reassure project participants and stakeholders, as well as forming major props for the constitution of various project actors’ identity and rationality. However, these practices cannot offer guarantees against the great many unknown unknowns that beset major infrastructure or innovation projects.

Third, debates between proponents of the planning fallacy and the hiding hand should also be seen as higher-order forms of academic ritual. They are rival explanations for megaproject decadence – differing accounts that rationalize its normalcy – allowing scholarly debates to mirror both the ritual and the decadence of the practices to which they attend (Ika and Pinto, 2025). Explanations for megaproject failures can account for them in terms of these covering explanations, each of which provides a set of solution recipes as to why failings occurred. Now, this is not to suggest that failure will always accompany megaprojects. A recent Handbook on International Infrastructure Development: A Critical Perspective (Clegg et al., 2024) provides some global examples of both more successful and less successful projects. Interestingly, in many of these projects, success and failure were only sometimes related to the extent of detailed technical planning and integration of project systems, not always. Several of the most successful examples were successful because of institutional contexts’ impact on the social integration of the project with key stakeholders (Liu et al., 2024).

The failure of megaprojects may well be more normal than we like to think, rather than being exceptional. Planning slowly is surely an important consideration as a project practice, but perhaps we should acknowledge its ritual as well as its purposive quality? If that were the case, we might have a more considered account of what happens when those rituals with which project managers buttress their identities fail. What these rituals do is to create order and predictability in the inherently chaotic and uncertain environments of projects, providing structure, rhythm and predictability. Ritual practices are mechanisms for maintaining alignment within the team and with stakeholders in which, despite bad news too frequently being the currency, project managers must strive to achieve a sense of collective identity and purpose. They do so through all those structured, repetitive, symbolic activities and processes that define how projects are run, which have several ritual functions.

Ritual practices offer known points of contact, decision-making and information sharing, helping to manage complexity and reduce anxiety for project managers and their teams. Ritual events such as stand-ups and status meetings are designed to ensure regular communication, keeping everyone informed, surfacing impediments and reinforcing shared goals. Kick-offs mark the beginning of a collective journey, stand-ups reinforce daily connection and retrospectives allow for collective reflection and learning. Phase-gate reviews and closure meetings act as rites of passage, formally marking transitions between different stages of the project lifecycle. Closure celebrations mark shared achievements. The way rituals are conducted communicates and reinforces a project’s culture and values. Is the stand-up quick and focused (value: efficiency)? Is the retrospective blame-free (value: psychological safety and learning)? Does the change control process feel bureaucratic or enabling (value: control vs flexibility)? Project managers use these rituals to shape the desired environment. Rituals such as formal status reports or steering committee meetings provide structured ways of managing stakeholder expectations, reporting progress, managing perceptions, seeking decisions and maintaining engagement according to agreed-upon rules.

As we know from Flyvbjerg’s work (Flyvbjerg and Gardener, 2023) on “fat tails” in megaprojects, the agreed-upon rules rarely deliver megaprojects on budget, on time and on scope. The rules can be followed, but these rules do not produce the predicted effects of being in control of the key variables of the “iron triangle”. Moreover, in megaprojects, Flyvbjerg tells us empirically, they repeatedly fail to afford this control. There are specific points in the rituals where the pressures of failure intensify. These are associated with change control processes. These are the formal, structured procedures used to manage, evaluate, approve or reject and document any proposed changes to the project’s agreed-upon scope, schedule, budget, quality requirements or other baseline elements after those baselines have been formally approved. Essentially, it’s the system for handling the inevitable reality that things change during a project, seeking to ensure that these changes don’t derail the project or happen in a chaotic, undocumented way that dumps responsibility firmly on the project managers’ shoulders. As all the organizational storytelling to which they are privy tells them so, project managers know that they are only ever as good as their last project.

One key problem for project management researchers for all that has been argued thus far is that they often do not engage with reality as lived experience. Instead, they devise hypotheses from a priori theories, develop survey items, ask questions and take accounts at face value. Some researchers do otherwise; for instance, Djolic (2024) researched project management lives at work as an ethnographer for a year. Deep ethnographic research produced a, perhaps surprising, conclusion: that project management should be regarded not so much as a technical or methodological discipline but as something experienced as fundamentally existential. Its disciplines both create and soothe the existential uncertainties of an insecure existence as a project manager. It is not only for Azande witchdoctors that rituals strive to keep existential dread at bay. Project managers routinely face profound, often unspoken, thus silent dilemmas, which challenge their core values, sense of purpose, identity and integrity. To navigate these effectively and avoid burnout or ethical compromise, project managers must acknowledge the inherent ambiguities and anxieties of their role, consciously developing strategies to reconcile project demands with personal meaning and ethical conduct. The most significant struggles for project managers often aren’t only about scope, time and budget. They entail ethical compromises, conflicting stakeholder values and dealing with ambiguity for which they will be held responsible, such as the politics of indexicality in interpreting contracts. There is a struggle to find meaning in work that is transient, that entails shifting from project to project, endlessly repeating practices that do not reliably deliver what they promise. The meaninglessness and inauthenticity of a life knowingly lived under constraints that you cannot change, using rituals that cannot deliver the purposes that you are supposed to serve, argues Djolic (2024), are such as to render the recurrently normal absurdity of project practices that cannot deliver what is demanded, deeply existentially problematic, a problematic rendered in their everyday accounts elaborating such struggles. Adhering to rituals creates a sense of legitimacy, providing a cloak of security for the megaproject manager against all that such projects can deliver to the identity of being a professional. A professional is one in control of time, budget and scope, yet these keep slipping away. Where they arrive is at the fat tail of Flyvbjerg’s statistics (Flyvbjerg and Gardener, 2023, p. 173).

The “fat tail” of megaprojects has been accompanied, I suggest, by an abundance of decadent theoretical accounts. These accounts also assume a ritual quality, in Barzan’s (2000) terms. Remember, decadence is a “technical label”. “When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent” (Barzan, 2000, p. xvi). Project studies of megaprojects are played out in language games in theory that mirror those played in practice in increasingly recursive loops (Wittgenstein, 1953). The language games should be accounted for in terms of rituals that do not serve their manifest function of control; instead, they invite anthropological inquiry into their latent functions. The social implications of this proposition are that it is anthropological interventions into megaproject cultures that might help dissolve the language games being played and better control the variables that they are played with, as van Marrewijk et al. (2010) and van Marrejwijk and van den Ende (2022) propose.