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February 9 - February 9, 2025
Rome’s first emperor, the mighty Caesar Augustus, whose personal motto was “Festina lente,” or “Make haste slowly.”
call such premature lock-in the “commitment fallacy.”
“strategic misrepresentation,” the tendency to deliberately and systematically distort or misstate information for strategic purposes.
Eventually each of us came to accept the other’s position: psychology for me and politics for Kahneman.[7] Which factor is most important depends on the character of decisions and projects.
Hofstadter’s
“Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.” Notice, however, that Bezos carefully limited the bias for action to decisions that are “reversible.”
Planning is working on the project. Progress in planning is progress on the project, often the most cost-effective progress you can achieve. We lose sight of these facts at our peril.
STRATEGIC MISREPRESENTATION
there is often a theoretical budget that is given because it is the sum that politically has been released to do something. In three out of four cases this sum does not correspond to anything in technical terms. This is a budget that was made because it could be accepted politically.
‘if we gave the true expected outcome costs nothing would be built.’
scholars call this phenomenon “lock-in” or “escalation of commitment.”[33]
central to any account is the “sunk cost fallacy.”
But even politicians who know better understand that the public is likely to be swayed by sunk costs, so sticking with a fallacy is politically safer than making a logical decision.
Somervell was also steeped in a “can-do” army engineering culture that prized System One decisiveness and getting stuff done above all else.
We should be careful not to see psychology and politics as separate forces; they can be mutually reinforcing and typically are in big projects.[37]
Superficial planning is common and will be exposed only if those with the authority to supervise and approve plans—including the general public when it comes to government projects—exercise that power properly by subjecting plans to serious questioning.
reveal fundamental flaws in the plan or gaps, much less correct them.
In contrast, good planning explores, imagines, analyzes, tests, and iterates. That takes time. Thus, slow is a consequence of doing planning right, not a cause. The cause of good planning is the range and depth of the questions it asks and the imagination and the rigor of the answers it delivers. Notice that I put “questions” before “answers.” It’s self-evident that questions come before answers. Or rather, it should be self-evident. Unfortunately, it’s not. Projects routinely start with answers, not questions.
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.
That’s called a “positive learning curve”: Things get easier, cheaper, and more effective with each iteration.[6]
“Repetitio est mater studiorum”—“Repetition is the mother of learning.”
Utzon never returned to Australia. He died in 2008, never having beheld his completed masterpiece with his own eyes. It’s a tragedy fit for opera.
digital simulation using software called CATIA.[13] Originally developed in 1977
Gehry and his team could alter a curve here or change a shape there, and the computer would quickly calculate the implications for every other aspect of the building, from the structural integrity (Will it stand?) to the functionality of the electrical and plumbing systems (Will it work?) and the budget (Can we afford it?). Iteration was now supercharged.
Only after the completion of its “digital twin”—a term that would be coined years after Gehry first created one—did construction begin in the real world.
In bad planning, it is routine to leave problems, challenges, and unknowns to be figured out later. That’s how the Sydney Opera House got into trouble. In that case, Jørn Utzon did eventually solve the problem, but it was too late. The budget had exploded, construction was years behind schedule, and Utzon was ousted with his reputation in tatters. In many projects, the problem is never solved.
For planners, the illusion of explanatory depth is obviously dangerous. But researchers also discovered that, unlike many other biases, there is a relatively easy fix: When people try and fail to explain what they mistakenly think they understand, the illusion dissolves.
Planning is iteration and learning before you deliver at full scale, with careful, demanding, extensive testing producing a plan that increases the odds of the delivery going smoothly and swiftly.
When a minimum viable product approach isn’t possible, try a “maximum virtual product”—a hyperrealistic, exquisitely detailed model like those that Frank Gehry made for the Guggenheim Bilbao and all his buildings since and those that Pixar makes for each of its feature films before shooting.
Try, learn, again. Whatever the project or the technology, it’s the most effective path to a plan that delivers.
Age reflects time, and time enables experience.
Aristotle said that experience is “the fruit of years” and argued that it is the source of what he called “phronesis”—the “practical wisdom” that allows us to see what is good for people and to make it happen, which Aristotle saw as the highest “intellectual virtue.”[1]
since “who gets what” is the core of politics, there is politics in every big project, whether public or private.
The desire to do what has never been done before can be admirable, for sure. But it can also be deeply problematic.
Planners don’t value experience to the extent they should because they commonly suffer yet another behavioral bias, “uniqueness bias,” which means they tend to see their projects as unique, one-off ventures that have little or nothing to learn from earlier projects.[5] And so they commonly don’t.
Ambition not only urges us to be first, it can also drive us to deliver the biggest. The tallest. The longest. The fastest.
“Eternal Beginner Syndrome.”[11]
But another factor was his insistence that the project use existing, proven technologies “in order to avoid the uncertainty of innovative methods.”[16]
Highly experienced project leaders like Frank Gehry and Pete Docter overflow with tacit knowledge about the many facets of the big projects they oversee. It improves their judgment profoundly.
“skilled intuition,”
When a highly experienced project leader uses a highly iterative planning process—what I earlier called “Pixar planning”—good things happen.
the best plan? That’s one that maximizes experience and experimentation—and is drafted and delivered by a project leader and team with phronesis.
But when things go wrong and people get desperate, the obvious is often overlooked, and it’s assumed that if delivery fails, the problem must lie with delivery, when in fact it lies with forecasting.
How long will it take? How much will it cost? Forecasting is critical to any project.
“How did you make your forecasts?”
After writing a series of stories about a bridge proposal backed by Robert Moses, a long-serving state bureaucrat, Caro realized how powerful Moses was and decided to write his biography. He knew it was an ambitious project. Moses had been shaping New York City for more than forty years and had built more megaprojects than any other person in history. He was also secretive, preferring to stay far from public view. Still, Caro was fairly confident that he could complete his book in nine months and certain that he would finish within a year.[2]
Caro used to create his forecast is known as “anchoring and adjustment.”[6]
As psychologists have shown in countless experiments, final estimates made this way are biased toward the anchor, so a low anchor produces a lower estimate than a high anchor does. That means the quality of the anchor is critical.
Are the benchmarks reasonable? Logically, that should be the first question that is asked, but it rarely comes up at all.
we frame the problem as one of time and money overruns, it may never occur to us to consider that the real source of the problem is not overruns at all; it is underestimation. This project was doomed by a large underestimate. And the underestimate was caused by a bad anchor.
