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

Planning is working on the project. Progress in planning is progress on the project, often the most cost-effective progress you can achieve.

good planning explores, imagines, analyzes, tests, and iterates. That takes time. Thus, slow is a consequence of doing planning right, not a cause.

“Why are you doing this project?”

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.

Asking “Why?” can work only where people feel free to speak their minds and the decision makers really listen.

We’re good at learning by tinkering—which is fortunate, because we’re terrible at getting things right the first time.

If decision makers valued experience properly, they would be wary of a technology that is new, because it is inexperienced technology.

Much subsequent research revealed that people will anchor in almost any number they happen to be exposed to prior to making their forecast. 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.

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.”