The Scandal of Prediction
Welcome to Sydney – One March evening, a few men and women were standing on the esplanade overlooking the bay outside the Sydney Opera House. They all had come to pay the price of sophistication. Soon they would listen for several hours to a collection of men and women singing in Russian. While Australians were under the illusion that they had built a monument to distinguish their skyline, actually it was a monument to our failure to predict and to plan.
The story is as follows. The Sydney Opera House was supposed to open in early 1963 at a cost of AU$ 7 million. It finally opened its doors more than ten years later, and, although it was a less ambitious version than initially envisioned, it ended up costing around AU$ 104 million. While there are far worse cases of planning failures or failures to forecast, the Sydney Opera House provides an illustration of the difficulties.
Driven by political urgency, construction began in 1959 before the design was finalized. The location, Bennelong Point, was chosen with insufficient geotechnical investigation, leading to unforeseen complications when soft soil rather than sandstone was found. This required deep foundations—700 bored piles—causing massive cost overruns.
Structural engineers were forced to make early decisions based on Scientific Wild Guesses for unknown roof loads and evolving designs. The famous roof wasn’t fully defined until five years after foundational work had already begun. This led to expensive redesigns and rework. Ultimately, the project finished 10 years late and at 29 times the original cost. The case illustrates how optimism and political momentum often override technical realities, leading to disasters that hindsight would have easily predicted.
This case study has much relevance in modern time large infrastructure project which needs retrofitting once they start functioning. Such examples are all around us. As investor, we have a built-in tendency to think that we know a little bit more than everyone else which is enough get us into serious trouble. Second, we boast ourselves for all the activities involving prediction and we think we are master of it. This is how we become part of ‘Predicting Scandal’.
At Shalibhadra, we rely more on efficient process rather than predicting future which is not in anyone’s control.
Nishit Siddharth Shah