Decoupling Cause and Effect in Major Projects: An Exploratory Workshop Study on Complexity, Temporal Displacement, and Implications for Time Pressure

Major projects and megaprojects are large-scale, capital-intensive undertakings marked by long durations, high uncertainty, extensive stakeholder interfaces, deep interdependencies, and strong budget and schedule pressure. In such environments, failures rarely stem from a single isolated event; rather, they emerge through coupled sequences of requirements, decisions, handovers, and execution constraints that accumulate over time. A central practical challenge is that the effects of earlier deficiencies often become visible only much later, when correction is more expensive and more disruptive. This article examines that temporal separation between origin and visibility as a form of cause-effect decoupling in major projects. The empirical basis is a structured workshop with four focus groups from an international major-project organization (N = 25), covering engineering, procurement, expediting, inspection, quality, manufacturing, project engineering, scheduling, and project management. Participants mapped where the causes of project problems were perceived to arise and where their effects became visible across eight project phases. The results indicate a clear temporal asymmetry. Causes are concentrated in specification preparation, fabrication-documentation preparation, and contract-related work, whereas visible effects are concentrated later, especially in fabrication-documentation preparation, manufacturing, acceptance testing, and final documentation. The weighted phase-center of causes lies at 3.11 and that of effects at 4.39, indicating a downstream displacement of 1.28 phases. Category-specific analysis further suggests that the magnitude of displacement varies by functional role, with the strongest lag perceived in expediting and procurement, a moderate lag in project management and coordination, and a smaller but still positive lag in technical execution and quality-related functions. Drawing on a formal categorization of project states (Huemmer, 2020), the observed pattern is consistent with characteristics of a “complex” project state, in which the connection between cause and effect is not readily discernible in real time and may only be reconstructed retrospectively. The findings are therefore consistent with the interpretation that delayed visibility of earlier deficiencies may be an important mechanism in the formation of experienced project complexity, especially under conditions of schedule pressure. The article contributes an exploratory empirical bridge between complexity theory and time-pressure theory and derives implications for front-end clarification, specification governance, document maturity control, gate design, and cross-functional communication.