(p. B5) Bent Flyvbjerg is an expert in the planning and management of “megaprojects,” his name for huge efforts that require at least $1 billion of investment: bridges, tunnels, office towers, airports, telescopes and even the Olympics. He’s spent decades wrapping his mind around the many ways megaprojects go wrong and the few ways to get them right, and he summarizes what he’s learned from his research and real-world experience in a new book called “How Big Things Get Done.”
Spoiler alert! Big things get done very badly.
They cost too much. They take too long. They fall too short of expectations too often. This is what Dr. Flyvbjerg calls the Iron Law of Megaprojects: “over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over again.”
The Iron Law of Megaprojects might sound familiar to anyone who has survived a home renovation. But when Dr. Flyvbjerg dug into the numbers, the financial overruns and time delays were more common than he expected. And worse. Much worse.
His seminal work on big projects can be distilled into three pitiful numbers:
• 47.9% are delivered on budget.
• 8.5% are delivered on budget and on time.
• 0.5% are delivered on budget, on time and with the projected benefits.
. . .
Humans are optimistic by nature and underestimate how long it takes to complete future tasks. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times we fall prey to this cognitive bias known as the planning fallacy. We can always ignore our previous mishaps and delude ourselves into believing this time will be different. We’re also subject to the power dynamics and competitive forces that complicate reality, since megaprojects don’t take place in controlled environments, and they are plagued by politics as much as psychology. Take funding, for example. “How do you get funding?” he said. “By making it look good on paper. You underestimate the cost so it looks cheaper, and you underestimate the schedule so it looks like you can do it faster.”
For the full review, see:
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date February 2, 2023, and has the title “SCIENCE OF SUCCESS; 99% of Big Projects Fail. His Fix Starts With Legos.”)
The book under review is:
Flyvbjerg, Bent, and Dan Gardner. 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. New York: Currency, 2023.