How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between

by Bent Flyvbjerg

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.

projects don’t go wrong so much as they start wrong.

The critical next step is to stop thinking of black swans the way most people do. They are not bolt-from-the-blue freak accidents that are impossible to understand or prevent. They can be studied. And mitigated.

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]

As with reference-class forecasting, the big hurdle to black swan management is overcoming uniqueness bias. If you imagine that your project is so different from other projects that you have nothing to learn from them, you will overlook risks that you would catch and mitigate if you instead switched to the outside view.

There are always other costs—costs that never appear on any spreadsheet—when a project spirals out of control. The simplest are what economists call “opportunity costs”: the money unnecessarily burned by bad planning that could have been used to fund something else, including other projects.