How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration

by Professor Bent Flyvbjerg

“Think fast, act slow,” for reasons I’ll explain later. It is a hallmark of failed projects.

I call the pattern followed by the Empire State Building and other successful projects “Think slow, act fast.”

In total, only 8.5 percent of projects hit the mark on both cost and time. And a min-uscule 0.5 percent nail cost, time, and benefits. Or to put that another way, 91.5 percent of projects go over budget, over schedule, or both And 99.5 percent of projects go over budget, over schedule, under benefits, or some combination of these. Doing what you said you would do should be routine, or at least common. But it almost never happens

Planning is a safe harbor. Delivery is venturing across the storm-tossed seas.

Not only is it safer for planning to be slow, it is good for planning to be slow, as the directors at Pixar well know. After all, cultivating ideas and innovations takes time. Spotting the implications of different options and approaches takes more time. Puzzling through complex problems, coming up with solutions, and putting them to the test take still more time. Planning requires thinking—and creative, critical, careful thinking is slow.

Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said that if he had five minutes to chop down a tree, he’d spend the first three sharpening the ax.29 That’s exactly the right approach for big projects: Put enormous care and effort into planning to ensure that delivery is smooth and swift. Think slow, act fast: That’s the secret of success.

If “Think slow, act fast” is the wise approach to big projects, why do so many people do the exact opposite? Because they rush to commit. You do need to commit. But not in the way you think.

Such limited vision is rooted deep in our psychology, as we will see later. That doesn’t make it any the wiser for big projects.

Unchecked, optimism leads to unrealistic forecasts, poorly defined goals, better options ignored, problems not spotted and dealt with, and no contingencies to counteract the inevitable surprises. Yet, as we will see in later chapters, optimism routinely displaces hard-nosed analysis in big projects, as in so much else people do.

It isn’t the bias for action promoted by Jeff Bezos; it’s a bias against thinking.

Planning is working on the project. Progress in planning is progress on the project, often the most cost-effective progress you can achieve. We lose sight of these facts at our peril. Let’s see why.

At first, commit to having an open mind; that is, commit to not committing.

In contrast, good planning explores, imagines, analyzes, tests, and iterates. That takes time. Thus, slow is a consequence of doing planning right, not a cause. The cause of good planning is the range and depth of the questions it asks and the imagination and the rigor of the answers it delivers. Notice that I put “questions” before “answers.” It’s self-evident that questions come before answers. Or rather, it should be self-evident. Unfortunately, it’s not. Projects routinely start with answers, not questions.

Projects are not goals in themselves. Projects are how goals are achieved. People don’t build skyscrapers, hold conferences, develop products, or write books for their own sakes. They do these things in order to accomplish other things.

Developing a clear, informed understanding of what the goal is and why—and never losing sight of it from beginning to end—is the foundation of a successful project.

Silicon Valley is far removed from these worlds, yet the same basic idea is widely used in technology circles. “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology,” Steve Jobs told the audience at Apple’s 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference. “You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out how you’re going to try to sell it. I made this mistake probably more than anybody in this room, and I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it.”9 Today, “work backwards” is a mantra in Silicon Valley.

By carefully working through what must be done to get to their goal, the logic that surfaced midconstruction and convinced David and Deborah to make piecemeal expansions of the project will instead surface up front in a conversation about what other renovations they might consider. And if major work is under way and they would have to move out anyway, would it not make sense to also consider other work they might want to do in the future? To get it all over with at once. Plus it’s cheaper to have workers come on-site once and do many jobs rather than come back multiple times.

BEING FIRST The ambition to be the first with something is another way experience gets sidelined.

The only upside to the misery was that those who went second, third, and fourth could study our experience and do better. But did they? Probably not. Similar large-scale IT projects continue to be deeply troubled. Planners don’t value experience to the extent they should because they commonly suffer yet another behavioral bias, “uniqueness bias,” which means they tend to see their projects as unique, one-off ventures that have little or nothing to learn from earlier projects.5 And so they commonly don’t.

But the first-mover advantage is greatly overstated. In a watershed study, researchers compared the fates of “pioneer” companies that had been the first to exploit a market and “settlers” that had followed the pioneers into the market. Drawing on data from five hundred brands in fifty product categories, they found that almost half of pioneers failed, compared to 8 percent of settlers. The surviving pioneers took 10 percent of their market, on average, compared to 28 percent for settlers. Getting into the market early was indeed important—“early market leaders have much greater long-term success,” the researchers noted—but those “early” market leaders “enter an average of 13 years after pioneers.”7 The consensus of researchers today is that, yes, being first to market can confer advantages in certain specific circumstances, but it comes at the terrible cost of an inability to learn from the experience of others.

If we see technology this way, it is clear that, other things being equal, project planners should prefer highly experienced technology for the same reason house builders should prefer highly experienced carpenters. But we often don’t see technology this way. Too often, we assume that newer is better. Or worse, we assume the same of something that is custom designed, which we praise as “unique,”“bespoke,” or “original.” If decision makers valued experience properly, they would be wary of a technology that is new, because it is inexperienced technology.

later. As previously mentioned, that practical wisdom is what Aristotle called “phronesis.” He held it in higher regard than any other virtue, “for the possession of the single virtue of phronesis will carry with it the possession of them all [i.e., all the relevant virtues],” as he emphasized.25 In short, if you have phronesis, you’ve got it all. Therefore, a project leader with abundant phronesis is the single greatest asset a project can have. If you have a project, hire a leader like that.

Marketers often make use of this phenomenon. When you encounter a “limit six per customer” sign at the grocery store, there’s a good chance that the sign is there to expose you to the number six, making it the anchor when you decide how many items to buy.

so realism was seen as pessimism and ignored. Such behavior is as common as bad anchoring and reinforces it.

I started with an obscure phrase found within a paper that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published in 1979—not the famous 1979 paper on “prospect theory” that won Kahneman the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 but another paper the prolific duo published the same year. The phrase is “reference class.”8

Kahneman and Tversky dubbed these two perspectives the “inside view” (looking at the individual project in its singularity) and the “outside view” (looking at a project as part of a class of projects, as “one of those”). Both are valuable. But they’re very different. Although there’s little danger that a forecaster will ignore the inside view, overlooking the outside view is routine. That’s a fatal error. To produce a reliable forecast, you need the outside view.

I came to call this process “reference-class forecasting” (RCF).11 After I developed it for Gordon Brown, the British government used it to forecast the time and cost of major projects and was so satisfied with the results that it made the process mandatory.12 Denmark did the same.13 RCF has also been used in the public and private sectors in the United States, China, Australia, South Africa, Ireland, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.14 All that experience has enabled rigorous testing, and a slew of independent studies has confirmed that “RCF indeed performs the best,” in the words of one.15 It performs the best by a large margin. The gap between a conventional forecast and one that uses RCF varies by project type, but for over half the projects for which we have data, RCF is better by 30 percentage points or more. That’s on average. A 50 percent increase in accuracy is common. Improvements of more than 100 percent are not uncommon.

Most gratifyingly, given the method’s intellectual roots, Daniel Kahneman wrote in Thinking, Fast and Slow that using reference-class forecasting is “the single most important piece of advice regarding how to increase accuracy in forecasting through improved methods.”16

Early delays cause chain reactions throughout the delivery process. The later a delay comes, the less remaining work there is and the less the risk and impact of a chain reaction. President Franklin Roosevelt got it right when he said, “Lost ground can always be regained—lost time never.”28 Knowing this, we advised measures that would cut the probability of early delays and chain reactions.

“Since we are apparently on the trail here of some sort of Invisible or Hidden Hand that beneficially hides difficulties from us, I propose ‘the Hiding Hand.’”

most successful movies of all time? The terrible script compelled the actors and director to invent scenes and dialogue together, including moments that gave the characters real depth. And the deficiencies of the mechanical sharks forced Spielberg to shift the focus to the people and only hint at the terror in the water for most of the movie, which turned out to be a lot scarier than any image of a shark. Those two innovations elevated a schlocky B-movie into a box-office smash hit and a masterpiece of suspense.11

We saw another epic story that fits Hirschman’s argument a couple of chapters back: The difficulty of turning Jørn Utzon’s “magnificent doodle” into the Sydney Opera House was badly underestimated, but construction went ahead, Utzon eventually cracked the puzzle, and although the project went vastly over budget, took far too long, and was internally flawed, the opera house ultimately became one of the world’s great buildings.

It’s not just the drama of my story that would come up short. So would the number of stories I could collect, for a simple reason: Projects that run into trouble and end in miserable failure are soon forgotten because most people aren’t interested in miserable failures; projects that run into trouble but persevere and become smash successes are remembered and celebrated.

be overstated, yet it is routinely disregarded.

Get a small thing, a basic building block. Combine it with another and another until you have what you need. That’s how a single solar cell becomes a solar panel, which becomes a solar array, which becomes a massive megawatt-churning solar farm. Modularity delivers faster, cheaper, and better, making it valuable for all project types and sizes. But for building at a truly huge scale—the scale that transforms cities, countries, even the world—modularity is not just valuable, it’s indispensable.

As the old Latin saying goes, “Repetitio est mater studiorum”—“Repetition is the mother of learning.” Yes, I wrote that in chapter 4. But repetition is the mother of learning.

changed. In The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, the definitive history of containerization, the economist Marc Levinson argued compellingly that the humble shipping container was nothing less than a major cause of globalization.24

“Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better. If you get the team right, chances are they will get the ideas right.”

Think of your project as “one of those,” gather data, and learn from all the experience those numbers represent by making reference-class forecasts.

WATCH YOUR DOWNSIDE It’s often said that opportunity is as important as risk. That’s false. Risk can kill you or your project. No upside can compensate for that. For fat-tailed risk, which is present in most projects, forget about forecasting risk; go directly to mitigation by spotting and eliminating dangers. A rider in the grueling three-week Tour de France bicycle race explained that participating is not about winning but about not losing, each day for twenty-one days. Only after that can you consider winning. Successful project leaders think like that; they focus on not losing, every day, while keeping a keen eye on the prize, the goal they are trying to achieve.

“I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done,” Steve Jobs once observed. The things not done helped Apple stay focused on a few products that became wildly successful because of that focus, according to Jobs.6