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

by Professor Bent Flyvbjerg

The Empire State Building had been estimated to cost $50 million. It actually cost $41 million ($679 million in 2021). That’s 17 percent under budget, or $141 million in 2021 dollars. Construction finished several weeks before the opening ceremony. I call the pattern followed by the Empire State Building and other successful projects “Think slow, act fast.”

The record of big projects is even worse than it seems. But there is a solution: Speed up by slowing down.

The pattern was so clear that I started calling it the “Iron Law of Megaprojects”: over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over again.13

In total, only 8.5 percent of projects hit the mark on both cost and time. And a minuscule 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.

If you are not a corporate executive or government official, and if the ambitious project you are contemplating is on a much smaller scale than these giants, it may be tempting to think that none of this applies to you. Resist that temptation. My data show that smaller projects are susceptible to fat tails, too. Moreover, fat-tailed distributions, not normal distributions, are typical within complex systems, both natural and human, and we all live and work within increasingly complex systems, which means increasingly interdependent systems. Cities and towns are complex systems. Markets are complex systems. Energy production and distribution are complex systems. Manufacturing and transportation are complex systems. Debt is a complex system. So are viruses. And climate change. And globalization. On and on the list goes. If your project is ambitious and depends on other people and many parts, it is all but certain that your project is embedded in complex systems.

Notice that these big, dramatic events, which are easily capable of damaging a project so badly that it delivers a black swan outcome, are themselves low probability and high consequence. That is, they are black swans. So a black swan crashing through the window of vulnerability may itself cause a black swan outcome.

From the dramatic to the mundane to the trivial, change can rattle or ruin a project—if it occurs during the window of time when the project is ongoing. Solution? Close the window. Of course, a project can’t be completed instantly, so we can’t close the window entirely. But we can make the opening radically smaller by speeding up the project and bringing it to a conclusion faster. That is a main means of reducing risk on any project. In sum, keep it short!

Most planning is done with computers, paper, and physical models, meaning that planning is relatively cheap and safe. Barring other time pressures, it’s fine for planning to be slow. Delivery is another matter. Delivery is when serious money is spent and the project becomes vulnerable as a consequence.

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

This is a major reason why, at Pixar—the legendary studio that created Toy Story, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Soul, and so many other era-defining animated movies—“directors are allowed to spend years in the development phase of a movie,” noted Ed Catmull, a co-founder of Pixar. There is a cost associated with exploring ideas, writing scripts, storyboarding images, and doing it all over and over again. But “the costs of iterations are relatively low.”28 And all that good work produces a rich, detailed, tested, and proven plan. When the project moves into the production phase, it will, as a consequence of all that work, be relatively smooth and quick.

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.

People say that projects “go wrong,” which they all too often do. But phrasing it that way is misleading; projects don’t go wrong so much as they start wrong.

THE COMMITMENT FALLACY 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.

why didn’t Somervell realize that there was a much better site available before he sought and got approval for the original design? Why didn’t any of those who approved the plan spot the flaw? Because Somervell’s plan was so absurdly rushed and superficial that no one had even looked for other sites, much less considered their relative merits carefully. They had all treated the first suitable site identified as the only suitable site and hurried to get construction going as quickly as possible. 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.

“Act in haste, repent at leisure” is a centuries-old chestnut.

One is what I call “strategic misrepresentation,” the tendency to deliberately and systematically distort or misstate information for strategic purposes.5 If you want to win a contract or get a project approved, superficial planning is handy because it glosses over major challenges, which keeps the estimated cost and time down, which wins contracts and gets projects approved. But as certain as the law of gravity, challenges ignored during planning will eventually boomerang back as delays and cost overruns during delivery. By then the project will be too far along to turn back. Getting to that point of no return is the real goal of strategic misrepresentation. It is politics, resulting in failure by design.

The physicist and writer Douglas Hofstadter mockingly dubbed it “Hofstadter’s Law”: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”18

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.

Projects are often started by jumping straight to a solution, even a specific technology. That’s the wrong place to begin. You want to start by asking questions and considering alternatives. At the outset, always assume that there is more to learn. Start with the most basic question of all: Why?

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.

The whole conversation starts with a simple question: “Why are you doing this project?” Few projects start this way. All should.

In project planning, a standard tool is a flowchart that lays out, from left to right, what needs to be done and when, with the project concluding when the goal is achieved in the final box on the right. That simple concept is also valuable in the initial planning stages because it can help us visualize a project not as an end in itself but as a means to an end: The goal is the box on the right. That’s where project planning must begin by asking Frank Gehry’s question and thoughtfully exploring what should go in that box. Once that is settled, you can shift to considering what should go into the boxes on the left—the means that will best get you to your goal.

To pitch a new project at Amazon, you must first write a PR and FAQ, putting the goal smack in the opening sentences of the press release. Everything that happens subsequently is working backwards from the PR/FAQ, as it is called at Amazon.

“I called it ‘Oprah-speak,’” says Ian McAllister, a former Amazon executive who wrote multiple PR/FAQs for Jeff Bezos.12 “You know, Oprah would have someone on her show who would say something, and Oprah would turn to her audience and explain it in a very simple way that anyone can understand.” With language like that, flaws can’t be hidden behind jargon, slogans, or technical terms. Thinking is laid bare. If a thought is fuzzy, ill considered, or illogical, or if it is based on unsupported assumptions, a careful reader will see it.

Amazon forbids PowerPoint presentations and all the usual tools of the corporate world, so copies of the PR/FAQ are handed around the table and everyone reads it, slowly and carefully, in silence. Then they share their initial thoughts, with the most s...

People are terrible at getting things right the first time. But we’re great at tinkering. Wise planners make the most of this basic insight into human nature. They try, learn, and do it again. They plan like Pixar and Frank Gehry do.

“Planning” is a concept with baggage. For many, it calls to mind a passive activity: sitting, thinking, staring into space, abstracting what you’re going to do. In its more institutional form, planning is a bureaucratic exercise in which the planner writes reports, colors maps and charts, programs activities, and fills in boxes on flowcharts. Such plans often look like train schedules, but they’re even less interesting.

Experiri means “to try,” “to test,” or “to prove.” It is the origin of two wonderful words in English: experiment and experience.

“I have not failed ten thousand times,” Thomas Edison said. “I’ve successfully found ten thousand ways that will not work.”

“Repetitio est mater studiorum”—“Repetition is the mother of learning.”

Originally developed in 1977 by the French aerospace giant Dassault to design jets, it was modified for Gehry to design buildings in all their three-dimensional complexity. The level of detail and precision that CATIA enables is astonishing. It has empowered Gehry’s work and imagination as has no other tool.

First, iteration frees people to experiment, as Edison did with such success. “I need the freedom to just try a bunch of crap out. And a lot of times it doesn’t work,” Docter told me. With this process, that’s fine. He can try again. And again. Until he gets something that burns bright and clear, like Edison’s lightbulb. “If I knew I have to do this only once and get it right, I’d probably hew to the things that I know work.” And for a studio built on creativity, that would be a slow death.

Second, the process ensures that literally every part of the plan, from the broad strokes to the fine details, is scrutinized and tested.

This is a basic difference between good and bad planning. In bad planning, it is routine to leave problems, challenges, and unknowns to be figured out later. That’s how the Sydney Opera House got into trouble. In that case, Jørn Utzon did eventually solve the problem, but it was too late. The budget had exploded, construction was years behind schedule, and U...

Planning is cheap. Not in absolute terms, perhaps. The rough videos Pixar produces require a director leading a small team of writers and artists. Keeping them all working for years is a significant cost. But compared to the cost of producing digital animation ready for theaters, which requires hundreds of highly skilled people using the most advanced technology in the world, movie stars doing voices, and leading composers creating the score, it is so minor that even making experimental videos over and over again is relatively inexpensive.

Catmull is now retired from Pixar and Disney; under his leadership, Pixar successfully delivered twenty-one out of twenty-two projects he started, while Disney delivered ten out of eleven. No other studio in Hollywood’s more than one-hundred-year history has had a similar success rate. That is a process that works.

In Silicon Valley, the standard approach for startups is to release a product quickly, even if it is far from perfect, then continue developing the product in response to consumer feedback.

Planning, as I see it, is not merely sitting and thinking, much less a rule-based bureaucratic exercise of programming. It is an active process. Planning is doing: Try something, see if it works, and try something else in light of what you’ve learned. Planning is iteration and learning before you deliver at full scale, with careful, demanding, extensive testing producing a plan that increases the odds of the delivery going smoothly and swiftly.

“We must learn what customers really want,” he advised, “not what they say they want or what we think they should want.” The only way to do that is to “experiment.” Create a “minimum viable product,” put it in front of consumers, and see what happens. With lessons learned, change the product, ship again, and repeat the cycle.

As John Carreyrou observed, one reason Theranos got into trouble was that it used a Silicon Valley model commonly applied to software, which can afford to have initial glitches and failures, for medical testing, which cannot. Even for software-based companies, the lean startup model can easily be taken too far, as when glitches cause reputation-damaging product failures, security risks, breaches of privacy, and scandals such as Cambridge Analytica’s use of personal data.

The fact is that a wide array of projects—events, products, books, home renovations, you name it—can be simulated, tested, and iterated even by amateurs at home. Lack of technology isn’t the real barrier to adopting this approach; the barrier is thinking of planning as a static, abstract, bureaucratic exercise. Once you make the conceptual shift to planning as an active, iterative process of trying, learning, and trying again, all sorts of ways to “play” with ideas, as Gehry and Pixar do, will suggest themselves.

Try, learn, again. Whatever the project or the technology, it’s the most effective path to a plan that delivers.

Aristotle said that experience is “the fruit of years” and argued that it is the source of what he called “phronesis”—the “practical wisdom” that allows us to see what is good for people and to make it happen, which Aristotle saw as the highest “intellectual virtue.”1 Modern science suggests that he was quite right.

“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.

Along with the usual political concerns, one reason why mistakes such as Seattle’s happen is that we too often think that only people can be experienced, not things, and that therefore using new technology is not like hiring an inexperienced carpenter. That’s a mistake—because it is.

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

When planning, remember the Latin word experiri, the origin of the English words experiment and experience. Whenever possible, planning should maximize experience, both frozen and unfrozen.

Similarly, whenever possible, maximize experimentation using a highly iterative “Pixar planning” process. Whatever the relevant mechanisms of testing, from simple trial and error to sketches, wood-and-cardboard models, crude videos, simulations, minimum viable products, and maximum virtual products, test everything from the big ideas down to the small details.

A good plan, as I said, is one that maximizes experience or experimentation; a great plan is one that does both. And the best plan? That’s one that maximizes experience and experimentation—and is drafted and delivered by a project leader and team with phronesis.

How did MTR know that its delivery was failing? By the schedule and budget slipping. But slippage was measured against MTR’s forecasts of how long and how costly the various stages of the project would be. If those forecasts were fundamentally unrealistic, a team expected to meet them would fail no matter what they did. The delivery would be doomed before it started. That should be obvious. But when things go wrong and people get desperate, the obvious is often overlooked, and it’s assumed that if delivery fails, the problem must lie with delivery, when in fact it lies with forecasting.