Saudi Arabia Is Buying the Future, One Consultancy Report at a Time

There is a particular sound a Powerpoint clicker makes in a Riyadh hotel ballroom, and after a few seasons of conferences you begin to recognise it from the back row, where the journalists sit, two pots of mint tea in, watching the slides advance through the future at the unflinching pace of a metronome.

The future, on the slides, has good lighting. It also has a footer that says something like Phase 3, by the end of the decade, which is the part of the future where the timeline starts negotiating with itself. Phase 3 is always slightly further away than Phase 2 was when Phase 1 was being shown. This is not a complaint. It is just the texture of the work.

The consultancy economy

Saudi Arabia spends a quietly enormous amount of money on the production of futures. The consultancies bring teams that arrive looking like they have just stepped off a plane and leave looking like they belong, which they do, because the next plane brings a different team and the rotation never really ends. The decks they produce are, in the better cases, careful and earnest. In the worse cases, they are the deck from the last engagement with the logos changed.

The decks are not the project. The project is the thing in the desert that someone eventually has to dig. But the decks are how the project gets sold, and where the language of the project gets set, and once the language is set, the project tends to behave the way the language said it would. Most of the time. Not always. Often enough that the consultancy economy keeps reproducing itself.

Where the actual decisions get made

Talk to anyone who has actually moved a project from deck to ribbon-cutting, and the consultancy is usually somewhere in the supporting credits. The decision sits with the principal, which in this part of the world means a specific person or a small group of specific people whose names you can guess without anyone confirming them, and the principal does not, in the end, care about Phase 3. They care about whether the project ships on the timeline that lets them claim it.

The interesting question is not whether the decks are accurate. They are not, and everyone in the room knows this. The interesting question is whether the underlying capacity to deliver is being built fast enough that the decks become true on a delay. The answer, depending on the sector, is sometimes yes.

What this looks like up close

Up close it looks like a permitting office that suddenly works, and then a permitting office that suddenly does not, and then one that works again. It looks like a port that is dramatically modernised on a Tuesday and then runs at half capacity for three months because the software vendor is still onboarding. It looks like a city plan that gets unveiled with a film score and then quietly absorbs the second half of that film score's budget into the part of the city that someone forgot to put in the film.

None of which contradicts the headline ambition. The Kingdom is, in fact, transforming, in the boring and the spectacular ways at once. The decks are not lying. They are, in their characteristically formal way, telling the part of the truth that fits inside a slide. The part that does not fit is where everything actually happens, which is also where the conferences could, if they wanted, eventually decide to look.