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

Modularity is a clunky word for the elegant idea of big things made from small things. A block of Lego is a small thing, but by assembling more than nine thousand of them, you can build one of the biggest sets Lego makes, a scale model of the Colosseum in Rome. That’s modularity. Look for it in the world, and you’ll see it everywhere. A brick wall is made of hundreds of bricks. A flock of starlings, which moves as if it were a unitary organism, may be composed of hundreds or thousands of birds. Even our bodies are modular, composed of trillions of cells that are themselves modular. There’s an evolutionary reason for this ubiquity: In survival of the fittest, the “fittest” is often a module that is particularly successful in reproducing itself.[9] The core of modularity is repetition. Put down one Lego block. Snap on another. And another. And another. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Click, click, click. Repetition is the genius of modularity; it enables experimentation. If something works, you keep it in the plan. If it doesn’t, you “fail fast,” to use the famous Silicon Valley term, and adjust the plan. You get smarter. Designs improve. Repetition also generates experience, making your performance better. This is called “positive learning,” as we saw earlier. Repetition rockets you up the learning curve, making each new iteration better, easier, cheaper, and faster.