Sure enough, the distribution had a fat tail. High-speed rail is risky business, as we saw in Hong Kong. So we zeroed in on the projects in the tail and investigated what exactly had made each project blow up. The answers were surprisingly simple. The causes had not been “catastrophic” risks such as terrorism, strike actions, or other surprises; they had been standard risks that every project already has on its risk register. We identified roughly a dozen of those and found that projects were undone by the compound effects of these on a project already under stress. We found that projects
...more
