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; Dan Gardner
The book emphasizes the importance of meticulous planning and swift execution in project management. Drawing from empirical studies and historical examples, it outlines strategies to mitigate the common pitfalls of large-scale projects, such as budget overruns and delayed timelines. The text underscores the inherent complexities of managing mega projects and offers a structured approach to achieving better outcomes.
Key Concepts
1. Iron Law of Megaprojects:
This concept suggests that most large-scale projects will inherently suffer from budget and time overruns while underdelivering benefits. This law points to a systemic issue in project management, where initial estimates are often overly optimistic or not sufficiently grounded in reality. The book stresses the importance of acknowledging and preparing for this trend through more rigorous planning and forecasting.
2. Complexity and Interdependence:
The book highlights how modern projects, especially in technology and construction, are part of increasingly complex and interdependent systems. This complexity can lead to unexpected challenges, where small issues may escalate into significant problems akin to the butterfly effect. Understanding the nature of these systems and planning for potential disruptions is crucial for project success.
3. Slow Planning, Fast Execution:
The mantra "Think slow, act fast" encapsulates the idea of spending ample time planning to ensure every aspect of the project is thoroughly thought through, allowing for rapid and efficient execution. This approach minimizes risks and reduces the duration during which unforeseen problems can arise.
4. Use of Reference-Class Forecasting:
Reference-class forecasting is a method in which project planners use data and outcomes from similar past projects (the reference class) to predict better the costs, timelines, and potential hurdles of a new project. Grounding expectations in empirical evidence helps counteract common biases like over-optimism.
5. Iterative Planning:
Drawing inspiration from successful creative organizations like Pixar, the book recommends an iterative approach to planning. This involves cycles of planning, testing, learning from feedback, and refining the plan. Such an approach enhances the plan's robustness and builds a deeper understanding of the project's challenges among the team.
6. Modularity:
Modularity involves breaking a project into smaller, manageable, and often interchangeable units. This approach can lead to efficiencies in project execution, easier troubleshooting, and scalability. It also allows teams to replicate successful components in different parts of the project or future projects.
7. Leadership and Team Dynamics:
Effective project management is not just about processes and planning but also about people. The book emphasizes the importance of strong leadership and a cohesive team ethos. Leaders must cultivate a shared vision and clear communication, ensuring every team member feels empowered and aligned with the project's goals.
8. Risk Management:
Proactive risk management is vital, particularly for projects that follow a fat-tailed distribution where extreme outcomes are more likely than normally anticipated. The book advises identifying potential risks early and developing strategies to mitigate them before they affect the project.
Practical Applications
The insights from "Think Slow, Act Fast" can be applied across various industries and project types. For instance, IT project managers can use iterative planning and reference-class forecasting to manage software development projects better. Construction managers can apply modular building techniques to streamline construction processes and reduce cost overruns. Leaders in startups can adopt these principles to enhance their product development cycles, ensuring they are both innovative and efficient.
Key Quotes
"Iron Law of Megaprojects: over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over."
"For want of a nail, the shoe was lost...” - illustrating how minor issues can lead to major consequences.
"Think slow, act fast" - the core principle for managing projects efficiently.
"Planning is cheap, delivery is expensive." - emphasizing the cost-effectiveness of thorough planning.
"Festina lente (Make haste slowly)." - captures the essence of moving quickly but without rushing.
"Projects don’t go wrong; they start wrong." - highlighting the importance of correct beginnings.
"Optimism is widespread, stubborn, and costly." - a caution against unrealistic positive forecasting.
"Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law."
"A little neglect may breed great mischief." - underscoring the impact of overlooking small details.
"We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want." - on the importance of understanding true customer needs.
Eleven Heuristics for Better Project Leadership
Heuristics are mental shortcuts used to reduce complexity, making decisions manageable. Heuristics are often tacit and need to be deliberately teased out before they can be shared verbally.
Check whether my heuristics resonate with your own experience before using them in practice. Even more important, use them as a source of inspiration for investigating, trying new things, and developing your own heuristics—which is what really matters.
o Hire a Masterbuilder
§ You want someone with deep domain experience and a proven track record of success in whatever you’re doing.
o Get Your Team Right
§ “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.”[
§ When possible, hire a masterbuilder. And the masterbuilder’s team.
o Ask “Why?”
§ Asking why you’re doing your project will focus you on what matters, your ultimate purpose, and your result.
o Build with Lego
§ Big is best built from small.
o Think Slow, Act Fast
§ You do it by taking all the time necessary to create a detailed, tested plan. Planning is relatively cheap and safe; delivering is expensive and dangerous. Good planning boosts the odds of a quick, effective delivery, keeping the window on risk small and closing it as soon as possible.
o 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.
§ You do it by taking all the time necessary to create a detailed, tested plan. Planning is relatively cheap and safe; delivering is expensive and dangerous. Good planning boosts the odds of a quick, effective delivery, keeping the window on risk small and closing it as soon as possible.
o Watch Your Downside
§ For fat-tailed risk, which is present in most projects, forget about forecasting risk; go directly to mitigation by spotting and eliminating dangers.
§ Successful project leaders think like that; they focus on not losing, every day, while keeping a keen eye on the prize, the goal they are trying to achieve.
o Say No and Walk Away
§ Staying focused is essential for getting projects done. Saying no is essential for staying focused.
o 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.
o Build Climate Mitigation into Your Project
§ Aristotle defined phronesis as the dual ability to see what things are good for people and to get those things done.
o Know that Your Biggest Risk is You
§ 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.
Other Quotes
“We’re good at learning by tinkering—which is fortunate because we’re terrible at getting things right the first time.”
“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. That’s exactly the right approach for big projects: Put enormous care and effort into planning to ensure smooth and swift delivery. Think slow, act fast: That’s the secret of success.”
“The more time that passes from decision to delivery, the greater the probability of one or more of these events happening. It’s possible that trivial events, in just the wrong circumstances, can have devastating consequences.”
“Small is good. For one thing, small projects can be simple.”
“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.”
“But the cost of that haste was terrible, not only in cost overruns. Larsen was so appalled by the completed building that he wrote a book to clear his reputation and explain the confused structure, which he called a “mausoleum.” Haste makes waste.”
“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.”
“Think of how people typically learn: We tinker. We try this. We try that. We see what works and what doesn’t. We iterate. We learn. This is experimentation creating experience.”
“As the old Latin saying goes, “Repetitio est mater studiorum”—“Repetition is the mother of learning.”
“To understand the right way to get a project done quickly, it’s useful to think of a project as being divided into two phases. This simplifies, but it works: first, planning; second, delivery. The terminology varies by industry—in movies, it’s “development and production”; in architecture, “design and construction”—but the basic idea is the same everywhere: Think first, then do.”
“‘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.”
“A good plan, as I said, maximizes experience or experimentation; a great plan does both. And the best plan? That maximizes experience and experimentation—and is drafted and delivered by a project leader and team with phronesis.”
“A bad plan applies neither experimentation nor experience.”
“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 game's name is politics. And the balance shifts from psychology to strategic misrepresentation.”
“You want the flight attendant, not the pilot, to be an optimist”
“If we are routinely biased toward snap judgments and unrealistic optimism and these methods fail to deliver, we will suffer. Shouldn’t we learn from those painful experiences? We should, indeed. But to do that, we must pay attention to experience. And unfortunately, too often, we do not.”
“Heuristics are fast and frugal rules of thumb that simplify complex decisions. The word originates in the ancient Greek Eureka!, the cry of joy and satisfaction when one finds or discovers something.”
“Planning is doing: Try something, see if it works, and try something else in light of what you’ve learned. 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.”
“One reason Theranos got into trouble was that it used a Silicon Valley model commonly applied to software, which can afford to have initial glitches and failures, for medical testing, which cannot.”
“The fact is that a wide array of projects—events, products, books, home renovations, you name it—can be simulated, tested, and iterated even by amateurs at home. Lack of technology isn’t the real barrier to adopting this approach; the barrier is thinking of planning as a static, abstract, bureaucratic exercise. Once you make the conceptual shift to planning as an active, iterative process of trying, learning, and trying again, all sorts of ways to “play” with ideas, as Gehry and Pixar do, will suggest themselves.”
“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.”
“Don’t assume you know all there is to know. If you’re a project leader and people on your team, make this assumption—which is common—educate them or shift them out of the team. Don’t let yourself or them draw what appear to be obvious conclusions. That sort of premature commitment puts you at risk of missing glaring flaws and opportunities that could make your project much better than what you have in mind now.”
“Projects are often started by jumping straight to a solution, even a specific technology. That’s the wrong place to begin. You want to start by asking questions and considering alternatives. At the outset, always assume that there is more to learn. Start with the most basic question of all: Why?”
“At first, commit to having an open mind; that is, commit to not committing.”
“Michael Polanyi showed that much of the most valuable knowledge we can possess and use isn’t like that; it is “tacit knowledge.” We feel tacit knowledge. And when we try to put it into words, the words never fully capture it. Polanyi wrote, “We can know more than we can tell.”
“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.”
“Projects are not goals in themselves. Projects are how goals are achieved. People don’t build skyscrapers, hold conferences, develop products, or write books for their sake. They do these things to accomplish other things.”
“Once 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 overrun at all; it is an underestimation. A large underestimate doomed this project. And the underestimate was caused by a bad anchor. You must get the anchor right to create a successful project estimate.”
“In bad planning, it is routine to leave problems, challenges, and unknowns to be figured out later.”
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology,” Steve Jobs told the audience at Apple’s 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference. “You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out how you’re going to try to sell it. I made this mistake probably more than anybody in this room, and I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it.”
“See your project as one in a class of similar projects already done, as “one of those.” Use data from that class—about cost, time, benefits, or whatever else you want to forecast—as your anchor. Then, adjust up or down, if necessary, to reflect how your specific project differs from the mean in the class. That’s it. It couldn’t be simpler.”
“Define the class broadly. Err on the side of inclusion. And adjust the average only when there are compelling reasons to do so, which means that data exist that support the adjustment. When in doubt, skip adjustment altogether. The class mean is the anchor, and the anchor is your forecast. That’s very simple, yes. But simple is good; it keeps out bias.”
“The later a delay comes, the less 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.”
“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 unpredictably into project-smashing black swans.”
“Identify essential equipment, get backups, and make contingency plans. That kind of analysis is dead easy—but only after you have shifted to the outside view. Risk mitigation does not require predicting the exact circumstances that lead to disaster.”
“Exhaustive planning that enables swift delivery, narrowing the time window that black swans can crash through, is an effective means of mitigating this risk. Finishing is the ultimate form of black swan prevention; after a project is done, it can’t blow up, at least not regarding delivery.”
“If decision-makers valued experience properly, they would be wary of new technology because it is inexperienced technology. Anything that is truly “one of a kind” would set off alarm bells, but all too often, “new” or “unique” is treated as a selling point, not something to avoid. This is a big mistake. Planners and decision-makers make it all the time. It’s the main reason that projects underperform.”
“Margaret Mead supposedly told her students, “You’re absolutely unique, just like everyone else.” Projects are like that. Whatever sets a project apart, it shares other characteristics with projects in its class.”
“Kahneman and Tversky dubbed these two perspectives the “inside view” (looking at the individual project in its singularity) and the “outside view” (looking at a project as part of a class of projects, as “one of those”). Both are valuable. But they’re very different. Although there’s little danger that a forecaster will ignore the inside view, overlooking the outside view is routine. That’s a fatal error. To produce a reliable forecast, you need the outside view.”
“Good planning that sweeps away ignorance will reveal difficulties ahead, but that is no reason to quit and walk away.”
“The value of experienced teams cannot be overstated, yet it is routinely disregarded.”
“Most people think that unknown unknowns cannot be forecasted, and that sounds reasonable. However, the data for the projects in the reference class reflect everything that happened to those projects, including any unknown surprises. We may not know precisely what those events were. And we may not know how big or how damaging they were. But we don’t need to know any of that. All we need to know is that the numbers for the reference class do reflect how common and how big the unknowns were for those projects, which means that your forecast will reflect those facts, too.”
“We perform at our best when we feel united, empowered, and mutually committed to accomplishing something worthwhile.”
“This time is different” is the motto of uniqueness bias.”
“Psychological safety boosts morale, fosters improvements, and ensures that, in Andrew Wolstenholme’s words, “bad news travels fast”—so problems can be tackled quickly.”
Conclusion
"Think Slow, Act Fast" offers a robust framework for navigating the complexities of modern projects. By combining strategic planning, empirical data, and a focus on team dynamics and leadership, the book provides valuable guidelines that can help project managers achieve more predictable and successful outcomes. Whether dealing with a multinational infrastructure project or a small tech startup, the principles laid out can lead to better-managed, more efficiently executed projects.
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