How Big Things Get Done Quotes

“We’re good at learning by tinkering—which is fortunate, because we’re terrible at getting things right the first time.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“YOU WANT THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT, NOT THE PILOT, TO BE AN OPTIMIST”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said that if he had five minutes to chop down a tree, he’d spend the first three sharpening the ax.[29] That’s exactly the right approach for big projects: Put enormous care and effort into planning to ensure that delivery is smooth and swift. Think slow, act fast: That’s the secret of success.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“Small is good. For one thing, small projects can be simple.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“Wealth, for example, is fat-tailed. At the time of writing, the wealthiest person in the world is 3,134,707 times wealthier than the average person. If human height followed the same distribution as human wealth, the tallest person in the world would not be 1.6 times taller than the average person; he would be 3,311 miles (5,329 kilometers) tall, meaning that his head would be thirteen times farther into outer space than the International Space Station.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration

“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.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“On project after project, rushed, superficial planning is followed by a quick start that makes everybody happy because shovels are in the ground. But inevitably, the project crashes into problems that were overlooked or not seriously analyzed and dealt with in planning. People run around trying to fix things. More stuff breaks. There is more running around. I call this the “break-fix cycle.” A project that enters it is like a mammoth stuck in a tar pit.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“I call such premature lock-in the “commitment fallacy.” It is a behavioral bias on a par with the other biases identified by behavioral science.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“But the cost of that haste was terrible, and not only in terms of cost overruns. Larsen was so appalled by the completed building that he wrote a whole book to clear his reputation and explain the confused structure, which he called a “mausoleum.” Haste makes waste.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“Again, the more time that passes from decision to delivery, the greater the probability of one or more of these events happening. It’s even possible that trivial events, in just the wrong circumstances, can have devastating consequences.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“Projects are not goals in themselves. Projects are how goals are achieved. People don’t build skyscrapers,”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost. For want of a rider, the battle was lost. For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“A proverb that originated in the Middle Ages and comes in many forms tells us, “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost. For want of a rider, the battle was lost. For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost.” This version was published by Benjamin Franklin in 1758, and he introduced it with the warning that “a little neglect may breed great mischief.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“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. Operations experts call this “negative learning”: The more you learn, the more difficult and costly it gets.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“The problem isn’t nuclear power; many other project types have track records only somewhat less bad. The problem lies in the way huge projects like Monju are typically designed and delivered. When we understand that problem, we will find a solution to building big that is, paradoxically, small. In fact, it is tiny, like a single block of Lego. But it’s remarkable what you can do with blocks of Lego, as we will see.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“You set a man to work in the morning and you’ve put the things there that he wants, then you get a good day’s work. You start them off in a bad way, and you know the next eight to ten hours, it’s going to be very difficult.” Multiply that by thousands of workers and thousands of days, and you do indeed get something massive.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“The third strategy was all about people. We perform at our best when we feel united, empowered, and mutually committed to accomplishing something worthwhile. Much psychological and organizational research tells us so.[8] It’s also common sense. There’s a word to describe a group of people who feel that way: they are a team.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“Everybody wants things done yesterday, but “what I’m constantly trying to do is slow things down,” he says. Take time to develop ideas. Take time to spot and correct problems. Do it on the drafting table, not the construction site. “If you slow things down sometimes and you take a second and a third look, you end up making less mistakes,” he says. “And that means [the project gets done] faster.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“Perhaps most important, management started celebrating progress against inchstones and milestones. The spiral of negativity was replaced by an updraft of accomplishment that everyone could feel. The whole turnaround process took ninety very intense days and nights.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“But if a project is falling behind, managers don’t want to wait until the next milestone arrives before they are alerted to the delay. They need to know and act as quickly as possible. Our data were so detailed that we could make a further set of subforecasts, so we invented “inchstones.” And we specified in detail beforehand who would be responsible for what. If MTR started falling behind under the new schedule, managers would know immediately, and they would know who must act, so no time would be wasted.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“Recall what Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1758: “A little neglect may breed great mischief.” This is why high safety standards are an excellent form of risk mitigation and a must on all projects. They’re not just good for workers; they prevent little things from combining in unpredictable ways into project-smashing black swans.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“They figure they have time to catch up, precisely because the delays happen early. That sounds reasonable. But it’s dead wrong. Early delays cause chain reactions throughout the delivery process. The later a delay comes, the less remaining work there is and the less the risk and impact of a chain reaction. President Franklin Roosevelt got it right when he said, “Lost ground can always be regained—lost time never.”[28] Knowing this, we advised measures that would cut the probability of early delays and chain reactions.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“Similarly, whenever possible, maximize experimentation using a highly iterative “Pixar planning” process. Whatever the relevant mechanisms of testing, from simple trial and error to sketches, wood-and-cardboard models, crude videos, simulations, minimum viable products, and maximum virtual products, test everything from the big ideas down to the small details. With good testing mechanisms that make failure relatively safe, take calculated risks and try new ideas. But recognize that the less proven something is, the more it must be tested.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“But the first-mover advantage is greatly overstated. In a watershed study, researchers compared the fates of “pioneer” companies that had been the first to exploit a market and “settlers” that had followed the pioneers into the market. Drawing on data from five hundred brands in fifty product categories, they found that almost half of pioneers failed, compared to 8 percent of settlers. The surviving pioneers took 10 percent of their market, on average, compared to 28 percent for settlers. Getting into the market early was indeed important—“early market leaders have much greater long-term success,” the researchers noted—but those “early” market leaders “enter an average of 13 years after pioneers.”[7] The consensus of researchers today is that, yes, being first to market can confer advantages in certain specific circumstances, but it comes at the terrible cost of an inability to learn from the experience of others. Better to be—like Apple following Blackberry into smartphones—a “fast follower” and learn from the first mover.[”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“What sets good planning apart from the rest is something completely different. It is captured by a Latin verb, experiri. Experiri means “to try,” “to test,” or “to prove.” It is the origin of two wonderful words in English: experiment and experience.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“Thinking from right to left is demanding because it’s not natural. What’s natural is WYSIATI—What You See Is All There Is—and focusing exclusively on what is in front of you. And when you are obsessed with a cool idea or you are deep into designing the project or buried in a thousand and one details, the box on the right is nowhere to be seen. That’s when trouble starts.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“And because it’s a participatory process with the relevant people deeply involved from the beginning, it ensures that the concept that finally emerges is seen with equal clarity in the minds of everyone from the person proposing the project to the CEO. Everyone is on the same page from the start.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“But “work backwards” also fails when planners aren’t compelled to nail down what’s in that final flowchart box on the right and forced to think from right to left. Without that, it’s easy to get consumed by the blizzard of details and difficulties that arise during the planning of any project, while the goal, which was only vaguely understood to begin with, fades from view. Then the project can veer off in unpredictable directions, as David and Deborah’s kitchen renovation did so spectacularly.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“In Kahneman’s laboratory experiments, the stakes are low. There is typically no jockeying for position, no competition for scarce resources, no powerful individuals or organizations, no politics of any kind. The closer a project is to that situation, the more individual psychology will dominate, which is what Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and other behavioral scientists have found. But as projects get bigger and decisions more consequential, the influence of money and power grows. Powerful individuals and organizations make the decisions, the number of stakeholders increases, they lobby for their specific interests, and the name of the game is politics. And the balance shifts from psychology to strategic misrepresentation.[”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“But fathom it we must, because although the details of this story may be extreme—particularly the speed—it is fundamentally typical of how big projects come together. Purposes and goals are not carefully considered. Alternatives are not explored. Difficulties and risks are not investigated. Solutions are not found. Instead, shallow analysis is followed by quick lock-in to a decision that sweeps aside all the other forms the project could take.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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