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

Notice that I’m not using precise numbers. That’s because the numbers can be scaled up or down as much as you like—from one to infinity and back again—without changing the character of the whole, much the same way that a flock of starlings is a flock of starlings and behaves like a flock of starlings whether it is made of fifty birds, five hundred, or five thousand. The technical term for this property is “scale free,” meaning that the thing is basically the same no matter what size it is. This gives you the magic of what I call “scale-free scalability,” meaning you can scale up or down following the same principles independently of where you are scalewise, which is exactly what you want in order to build something huge with ease. The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who first laid out the science of scale-free scalability, called this attribute “fractal”—like one of those popular Internet memes in which you see a pattern, then zoom into a detail within the pattern and discover that it looks the same as the pattern as a whole, and you keep zooming in and keep discovering the same pattern.[11]