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

Lacking experimentation and experience, what you learn as you proceed is that the project is more difficult and costly than you expected—and not just the single project you’re doing but the project type as such. Obstacles that were unknown are encountered. Solutions thought to work don’t. And you cannot make up for it by tinkering or starting over with revised plans. Operation...

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]

Subways would seem to be an even harder case for modularization, but when Madrid Metro carried out one of the world’s largest subway expansions between 1995 and 2003, it leaned on modularity in two ways. First, the seventy-six stations required for the expansion were treated like Lego, with all sharing the same simple, clean, functional design. Costs plunged, and speed of delivery soared. To amplify those effects, Madrid Metro shunned new technologies. Only proven technologies—those with a high degree of “frozen experience”—were used.

Following is a chart with all the project types arranged by how “fat-tailed” they are in terms of cost—meaning how much they are in danger of the extreme cost overruns that destroy projects and careers, blow up corporations, and humiliate governments.

Some readers will object that I have been unfair to the “one huge thing” model. They will argue that “one huge thing” projects—for instance, nuclear power plants—are hamstrung by public opinion, hostile governments, and the burdens of excessive safety and environmental regulation. Break the chains, they say, and those projects could perform just as well as or better than their modular competitors, wind and solar power. It’s an interesting hypothesis. Fortunately, a natural experiment put it to the test and we have the results.

The results couldn’t be clearer. The “one huge thing” model, exemplified by nuclear power, is the line crawling along the bottom of the diagram. It was crushed by “many small things”—wind and solar power—shooting up to the right. China is a critical case in the sense that it is the nation in the world with the most conducive conditions for nuclear power. So if nuclear power doesn’t succeed in scaling up there, it is unlikely to succeed anywhere—unless, of course, the nuclear industry disrupts itself, which is exactly what its more enlightened proponents now suggest. They have come to accept the limitations of the “one huge thing” model and are trying to take nuclear power in a radically different direction. They call for scaled-down reactors to be built in factories, shipped to where they are needed, and assembled on-site, again transforming the construction site into an assembly site, which is rightly seen as the key to success. These reactors would each produce only 10 to 20 percent of the electricity generated by a conventional nuclear reactor. But if more electricity is needed, a second reactor could be added. Or a third. Or however many are required.[29] The name of this new model for nuclear power says it all: They are “small modular reactors,” or SMRs.

HIRE A MASTERBUILDER I sometimes say that this is my only heuristic because the masterbuilder—named after the skilled masons who built Europe’s medieval cathedrals—possesses all the phronesis needed to make your project happen. You want someone with deep domain experience and a proven track record of success in whatever you’re doing, whether it’s a home renovation, a wedding, an IT system, or a skyscraper. But masterbuilders aren’t always available or affordable, in which case you need to think further and consider some of the following.

GET YOUR TEAM RIGHT This is the only heuristic cited by every project leader I’ve ever met. Ed Catmull explained why: “Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better. If you get the team right, chances are they will get the ideas right.”[5] But who should pick the team? Ideally, that’s the job of a masterbuilder. In fact, it’s the masterbuilder’s main job. This is why the role of masterbuilder is not as solitary as it sounds; projects are delivered by teams. So to amend my advice above: When possible, hire a masterbuilder. And the masterbuilder’s team.

ASK “WHY?” Asking why you’re doing your project will focus you on what matters, your ultimate purpose, and your result. This goes into the box on the right of your project chart. As the project sails into a storm of events and details, good leaders never lose sight of the ultimate result. “No matter where I am and what I’m doing in the delivery process,” noted Andrew Wolstenholme, the leader who delivered Heathrow’s Terminal 5 in chapter 8, “I check myse...

BUILD WITH LEGO Big is best built from small. Bake one small cake. Bake another. And another. Then stack them. Decoration aside, that’s all there really is to even the most towering wedding cake. As with wedding cakes, so with solar and wind farms, server farms, batteries, container shipping, pipelines, roads. They’re all profoundly modular, built with a basic building block. They can scale up like crazy, getting better, faster, bigger, and cheaper as they do. The small cake is the Lego brick—the basic building block—of the wedding cake. The solar panel is the Lego of the solar farm. The server is the Lego of the server farm. This potent little idea has been applied to software, subways, hardware, hotel...

THINK SLOW, ACT FAST What’s the worst that can happen during planning? Maybe your whiteboard is accidentally erased. What’s the worst that can happen during delivery? Your drill breaks through the ocean floor, flooding the tunnel. Just before you release your movie, a pandemic closes theaters. You ruin the most beautiful vista in Washington, DC. You have to dynamite months of work on the opera house, clear away the rubble, and start over. Your overpass collapses, killing dozens of people. And so much more. Almost any nightmare you can imagine can happen—and has happened—during delivery. You want to limit your exposure to this. You do it by taking all the time necessary to create a detailed, tested plan. Planning is relatively cheap and s...

TAKE THE OUTSIDE VIEW Your project is special, but unless you are doing what has literally never been done before—building a time machine, engineering a black hole—it is not unique; it is part of a larger class of projects. Think of your project as “one of those,” gather data, and learn from all the experience those numbers represent by making reference-class forecasts. Use the same focus to spot and mitigate risks. Switching the focus from your project to the c...

WATCH YOUR DOWNSIDE It’s often said that opportunity is as important as risk. That’s false. Risk can kill you or your project. No upside can compensate for that. For fat-tailed risk, which is present in most projects, forget about forecasting risk; go directly to mitigation by spotting and eliminating dangers. A rider in the grueling three-week Tour de France bicycle race explained that participating is not about winning but about not losing, each day for twenty-one days. Only after that can you consider winning. Successful project...

SAY NO AND WALK AWAY Staying focused is essential for getting projects done. Saying no is essential for staying focused. At the outset, will the project have the people and funds, including contingencies, needed to succeed? If not, walk away. Does an action contribute to achieving the goal in the box on the right? If not, skip it. Say no to monuments. No to untested technology. No to lawsuits. And so on. This can be difficult, particularly if your organization embraces a bias for action. But saying no is essential for the success of a project and an organization. “I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done,” Steve Jobs once observed. The things not done helped Apple stay focused on a few products that became wildly successful because of that focus, according to Jobs.[6]

MAKE FRIENDS AND KEEP THEM FRIENDLY A leader of a multibillion-dollar public sector IT project told me he spent more than half his time acting like a diplomat, cultivating the understanding and support of stakeholders who could significantly influence his project. Why? It’s risk management. If something goes wrong, the project’s fate depends on the strength of those relationships. And when something goes wrong, it’s too late to start developing and cultivating them. Build your bridges before you need them.

KNOW THAT YOUR BIGGEST RISK IS YOU It’s tempting to think that projects fail because the world throws surprises at us: price and scope changes, accidents, weather, new management—the list goes on. But this is shallow thinking. The Great Chicago Fire Festival failed not because Jim Lasko couldn’t predict the exact chain of circumstances that led to the malfunction of the ignition system (see chapter 6); it failed because he took the inside view on his project and didn’t study how failure typically occurs for live events as a class. Why didn’t he? Because focusing on the particular case and ignoring the class is what human psychology inclines us to do. The greatest threat Lasko faced wasn’t out in the world; it was in his own head, in his behavioral biases. This is true for every one of us and every project. Which is why your biggest risk is you.

We see from the table that the base rates are very different for different project types for both mean risk and tail risk. The highest mean risk is found for nuclear storage, at 238 percent, while the lowest is found for solar power, at 1 percent. The highest risk for ending up in the tail is held by the Olympics, at 76 percent, while the highest mean overrun in the tail is found for IT projects, at 447 percent. Differences in base rates must be taken into account when planning and managing projects but often are not. Frequently, empirical base rates are not considered at all.

PROJECT TYPE (A) MEAN COST OVERRUN (%)* (B) % OF PROJECTS IN TAIL (≥ 50% OVERRUN) (C) MEAN OVERRUN OF PROJECTS IN TAIL (%) Nuclear storage 238 48 427 Olympic Games 157 76 200 Nuclear power 120 55 204 Hydroelectric dams 75 37 186 IT 73 18 447 Nonhydroelectric dams 71 33 202 Buildings 62 39 206 Aerospace 60 42 119 Defense 53 21 253 Bus rapid transit 40 43 69 Rail 39 28 116 Airports 39 43 88 Tunnels 37 28 103 Oil and gas 34 19 121 Ports 32 17 183 Hospitals, health 29 13 167 Mining 27 17 129 Bridges 26 21 107 Water 20 13 124 Fossil thermal power 16 14 109 Roads 16 11 102 Pipelines 14 9 110 Wind power 13 7 97 Energy transmission 8 4 166 Solar power 1 2 50

FURTHER READINGS BY BENT FLYVBJERG If you’re interested in learning more about my research on project leadership, below is a list of recommended readings. Free downloads of the listed articles are available on Social Science Research Network (SSRN), ResearchGate, Academia, arXiv, and Google Scholar. Direct links to SSRN are provided below for each article that had been published at the time of writing this book. Bent Flyvbjerg, Alexander Budzier, Maria D. Christodoulou, and M. Zottoli, “So You Think Projects Are Unique? How Uniqueness Bias Undermines Project Management,” under review. Bent Flyvbjerg, Alexander Budzier, Mark Keil, Jong Seok Lee, Dirk W. Bester, and Daniel Lunn, “The Empirical Reality of IT Project Cost Overruns: Discovering a Power-Law Distribution,” Journal of Management Information Systems 39, no. 3 (Fall 2022), https://www.jmis-web.org. Bent Flyvbjerg, “Heuristics for Masterbuilders: Fast and Frugal Ways to Become a Better Project Leader,” Saïd Business School Working Papers, University of Oxford, 2022, https://papers.ssrn.com/​sol3/​papers.cfm?abstract_id=4159984. Atif Ansar and Bent Flyvbjerg, “How to Solve Big Problems: Bespoke Versus Platform Strategies,” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 38, no. 2 (2022): 1–31, https://papers.ssrn.com/​sol3/​papers.cfm?abstract_id=4119492. Bent Flyvbjerg, “Top Ten Behavioral Biases in Project Management: An Overview,” Project Management Journal 52, no. 6 (2021): 531–46, https://papers.ssrn.com/​sol3/​papers.cfm?abstr...