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

by Professor Bent Flyvbjerg

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...

SAY NO AND WALK AWAY Staying focused is essential for getting projects done. Saying no is essential for staying focused. At the outset, will the project have the people and funds, including contingencies, needed to succeed? If not, walk away. Does an action contribute to achieving the goal in the box on the right? If not, skip it. Say no to monuments. No to untested technology. No to lawsuits. And so on. This can be difficult, particularly if your organization embraces a bias for action. But saying no is essential for the success of a project and an organization. “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

MAKE FRIENDS AND KEEP THEM FRIENDLY A leader of a multibillion-dollar public sector IT project told me he spent more than half his time acting like a diplomat, cultivating the understanding and support of stakeholders who could significantly influence his project. Why? It’s risk management. If something goes wrong, the project’s fate depends on the strength of those relationships. And when something goes wrong, it’s too late to start developing and cultivating them. Build your bridges before you need them.

BUILD CLIMATE MITIGATION INTO YOUR PROJECT No task is more urgent today than mitigating the climate crisis—not only for the common good but for your organization, yourself, and your family. Aristotle defined phronesis as the dual ability to see what things are good for people and to get those things done. We know what’s good: climate mitigation, for instance, by electrifying everything—homes, cars, offices, factories, shops—and making sure that the electricity comes from abundant renewable sources. We have the ability to do this. In fact, it’s already happening, as we saw in chapter 9. Now it’s a matter of quickly accelerating and scaling up the effort with thousands more mitigation (and adaptation) projects, large and small, following the principles laid out in this book—which was a main motivation for writing it and for hammering out this list of heuristics.

KNOW THAT YOUR BIGGEST RISK IS YOU It’s tempting to think that projects fail because the world throws surprises at us: price and scope changes, accidents, weather, new management—the list goes on. But this is shallow thinking. The Great Chicago Fire Festival failed not because Jim Lasko couldn’t predict the exact chain of circumstances that led to the malfunction of the ignition system (see chapter 6); it failed because he took the inside view on his project and didn’t study how failure typically occurs for live events as a class. Why didn’t he? Because focusing on the particular case and ignoring the class is what human psychology inclines us to do. The greatest threat La...