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

Developing a clear, informed understanding of what the goal is and why—and never losing sight of it from beginning to end—is the foundation of a successful project.

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology,” Steve Jobs told the audience at Apple’s 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference. “You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out how you’re going to try to sell it.

Margaret Mead supposedly told her students, “You’re absolutely unique, just like everyone else.” Projects are like that. Whatever sets a project apart, it shares other characteristics with projects in its class. An opera house may be one of a kind because of its design and location, but it still has plenty in common with other opera houses, and we can learn a lot about how to construct a particular opera house by looking at opera houses in general and considering our opera house to be “one of those.” The category of opera houses is the reference class.

Kahneman and Tversky dubbed these two perspectives the “inside view” (looking at the individual project in its singularity) and the “outside view” (looking at a project as part of a class of projects, as “one of those”). Both are valuable. But they’re very different. Although there’s little danger that a forecaster will ignore the inside view, overlooking the outside view is routine. That’s a fatal error. To produce a reliable forecast, you need the outside view.

The word deadline comes from the American Civil War, when prison camps set boundaries and any prisoner who crossed a line was shot.[5]

Once the standards for finished work were agreed upon, skilled workers developed their own system of benchmarks to establish the quality of workmanship required for both themselves and everyone else to follow.

With a shared sense of identity, purpose, and standards, open communication is easier,

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.[11]

Success didn’t come cheaply. “We spent quite a lot of money on developing the team dynamics,” Andrew Wolstenholme said.

In 2021, the International Energy Agency, an autonomous intergovernmental organization established within the framework of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), released a detailed report examining what would be required to get to net zero.[36] It found that fossil fuels, which today account for four-fifths of the world’s energy production, could provide no more than one-fifth in 2050. Replacing them would require a vast increase in electrification—our grandchildren will encounter gas stations only in history books—and an explosion in the production of electricity by renewable energy sources.

Wind power must grow elevenfold. Solar power must grow a mind-boggling twentyfold.[37] Investment in renewable energy must triple by 2030, mostly delivered as hundreds, if not thousands, of large-scale, multibillion-dollar wind and solar farms. New nuclear and new hydro may have a role to play for the 2050 deadline, but for 2030 they have already proven too slow.