How Big Things Get Done, The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration
By Bent Flyvberg and Dan Gardner
A book that leaves its mark. Following analysis of data collected from 1910 onward and containing 16,000 projects from 136 countries, the authors describe their finding as to why projects fail to meet their time, cost, and benefits targets. Only 8.5% of projects meet their budget and are on time and “…the actual mean cost overrun of a major building project is 62%”. It covers topics from:
- Human biases and fallacies; sunk costs, uniqueness bias, etc.
- “Strategic misrepresentation” - “if we gave the true expected outcome costs nothing would be built”
- It tackles the costing of unknown unknowns, have you ever heard of reference class forecasting?
It provides the 11 heuristics for better project leadership, which include among others:
- Hiring a Masterbuilder
- Get your team right
- Ask “Why?”
- Build with Lego
- Think slow, act fast
- Know that your biggest risk is you.
- Etc.
My favorite quote from the book, referencing Thomas Edison – “I have not failed ten thousand times, I’ve successfully found ten thousand ways that will not work.”
