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

To create a successful project estimate, you must get...

In the social sciences, “survivorship bias” is the common mistake of noting only those things that made it through some selection process while overlooking those that didn’t.

typical project is one in which costs are underestimated and benefits are overestimated.

Kahneman identified optimism bias as “the most significant of the cognitive biases.”[14] An optimistic benefit estimate is clearly an overestimate, which is the prediction of Kahneman and behavioral science for project planning.

SINGLE, DETERMINED ORGANISM As important as it is to do the slow thinking that produces excellent planning and forecasting, acting fast in delivery takes more than a strong plan; you need an equally strong team. How are diverse people and organizations with different identities and interests turned into a single “us”—a team—with everyone rowing in the same direction: toward delivery?

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

Then the components were sent to the worksite to be assembled. To the untrained eye, T5 would have looked like a conventional construction site, but it wasn’t; it was an assembly site.[6] The importance of this difference cannot be overstated, and every large construction site will need to follow suit if construction is going to make it into the twenty-first century. This process, called “design for manufacture and assembly,” is how the hyperefficient car industry operates.

BAA understood, as so many others do not, that “lowest bid” does not necessarily mean “lowest cost,” so rather than follow the common practice of hiring the lowest bidders, BAA stuck with companies it had worked with for years and that had proven their ability to deliver what BAA needed. And it encouraged those companies to do the same with specialized subcontractors—experience again.

Modularity delivers faster, cheaper, and better, making it valuable for all project types and sizes. But for building at a truly huge scale—the scale that transforms cities, countries, even the world—modularity is not just valuable, it’s indispensable.

Complex bespokeness alone makes huge projects hard to deliver if done in this manner. But that is compounded by several more factors.

Finally, don’t forget black swans.

All projects are vulnerable to unpredictable shocks, with their vulnerability growing as time passes.

Modularity is a clunky word for the elegant idea of big things made from small things. A block of Lego is a small thing, but by assembling more than nine thousand of them, you can build one of the biggest sets Lego makes, a scale model of the Colosseum in Rome. That’s modularity.

As the old Latin saying goes, “Repetitio est mater studiorum”—“Repetition is the mother of learning.”

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, the definitive history of containerization, the economist Marc Levinson argued compellingly that the humble shipping container was nothing less than a major cause of globalization.[24]

Modular projects are in much less danger of turning into fat-tailed disasters. So modular is faster, cheaper, and less risky. That is a fact of immense importance.

Red tape and NIMBY opposition can and do indeed slow or stop projects in many countries, but not in China. In China, if the national government at the highest levels decides that a project is a priority, obstacles are eliminated and the project gets done.

They are “small modular reactors,” or SMRs.