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

That’s perfectly reasonable. It is also inapplicable to many decisions on big projects because they are so difficult or expensive to reverse that they are effectively irreversible: You can’t build the Pentagon, then knock it down and build it elsewhere after you discover that it ruins the view. When this bias for action is generalized into the culture of an organization, the reversibility caveat is usually lost. What’s left is a slogan—“Just do it!”—that is seemingly applicable in all situations. “When we surveyed participants in our executive education classes, we found that managers feel more productive executing tasks than planning them,” observed business professors Francesca Gino and Bradley Staats. “Especially when under time pressure, they perceive planning to be wasted effort.”[22] To put that in more general behavioral terms, people in power, which includes executives deciding about big projects, prefer to go with the quick flow of availability bias, as opposed to the slow effort of planning.[23] Executives everywhere will recognize that attitude. It isn’t the bias for action promoted by Jeff Bezos; it’s a bias against thinking.