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

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?”

What sets good planning apart from the rest is something completely different. It is captured by a Latin verb, experiri. Experiri means “to try,” “to test,” or “to prove.” It is the origin of two wonderful words in English: experiment and experience.

As the old Latin saying goes, “Repetitio est mater studiorum”—“Repetition is the mother of learning.”

the process ensures that literally every part of the plan, from the broad strokes to the fine details, is scrutinized and tested. Nothing is left to be figured out when the project goes into delivery.

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.

Once we frame the problem as one of time and money overruns, it may never occur to us to consider that the real source of the problem is not overruns at all; it is underestimation.

You may think, as most people do, that the solution is to look more closely at your kitchen renovation, identify all the things that could possibly go wrong, and work them into your forecast. It’s not. Spotting ways that things can go wrong is important because it enables you to reduce or eliminate risks or mitigate them, as I’ll discuss below. But it won’t get you the foolproof forecast you want, for the simple reason that no matter how many risks you can identify, there are always many more that you can’t. They are the “unknown unknowns,”

We also found that early delays in procurement and political decisions correlated with black swan blowouts in the HS2 reference class. Interestingly, early delays are not seen as a big deal by most project leaders. They figure they have time to catch up, precisely because the delays happen early. That sounds reasonable. But it’s dead wrong. 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.

The value of experienced teams cannot be overstated, yet it is routinely disregarded.

by giving companies only positive incentives to perform well—including bonuses for meeting and beating benchmarks—it ensured that the interests of the many different companies working on the project were not pitted against one another. Instead, everyone had the same interest:

BAA ensured that whatever workers needed, they got, right away, particularly when it involved safety.

Harvard professor Amy Edmondson dubbed this sense of being free to speak your mind “psychological safety.” It’s hard to overstate its value. Psychological safety boosts morale, fosters improvements, and ensures that, in Andrew Wolstenholme’s words, “bad news travels fast”—so problems can be tackled quickly.