How Big Things Get Done

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book explores how big projects succeed or fail and the underlying causes. Big things fail, and when they fail, they usually fail catastrophically. The book identifies the causes and explains how to fix them.

🎨 Impressions

Experience matters, time matters, planning matters, and modularity matters.

Experience is paramount for team members, especially managers and senior members. Inexperience kills projects, and experience is paramount for avoiding stupid mistakes that kill projects.

Many of the budget issues are due to unrealistic budgets because they get approved. If the actual cost were known, they would not have been approved. Modularity is the key to having efficient buildings and projects, the more The more time you spend on a project, the more likely it is that something unordinary will happen. Therefore, a short timeframe is paramount. Speed does not kill; sloth kills.

If you allow yourself to experiment and fail during planning, you insulate yourself from failing during implementation. Fail fast and learn from those failures.

Finally, the most significant reason projects fail is because the ones responsible think that the biggest obstacle is something other than themselves.

✍️ My Top Quotes

Data show that big projects that deliver as promised are rare.
For average homeowners, a home remodeling can easily be one of the most expensive, complex, challenging projects they ever tackle.
California’s bullet train to nowhere. The project was approved, and work began in a rush of excitement. But problems soon proliferated. Progress slowed. More problems arose. Things slowed further. The project dragged on and on. I call this pattern “Think fast, act slow,” for reasons I’ll explain later. It is a hallmark of failed projects.
Successful projects, by contrast, tend to follow the opposite pattern and advance quickly to the finish line. That’s how the Nepal schools project unfolded. So did the Hoover Dam, which was completed a little under budget in fewer than five years—two ahead of schedule.
“When we were in full swing going up the main tower,” Lamb’s partner Richmond Shreve recalled, “things clicked with such precision that once we erected fourteen and a half floors in ten working days—steel, concrete, stone and all.”
The Empire State Building had been estimated to cost $50 million. It acually cost $41 million ($679 million in 2021). That’s 17 percent under budget, or $141 million in 2021 dollars. Construction finished several weeks before the opening ceremony.
I call the pattern followed by the Empire State Building and other successful projects “Think slow, act fast.”
The record of big projects is even worse than it seems. But there is a solution: Speed up by slowing down.
There would also be an underwater tunnel for trains—the second longest in Europe—which would be built by a Danish-led contractor. That was interesting because Danes had little experience boring tunnels. I watched the announcement on the news with my father, who worked in bridge and tunnel construction. “Bad idea,” he grumbled. “If I were digging a hole that big, I would hire someone who had done it before.”
Engineers on the project told me at the time that it would be cheaper to abandon the tunnel and start again rather than pull out the borers, drain the tunnel, and repair it. But politicians overrode them because an abandoned tunnel would be too embarrassing. Inevitably, the whole project came in very late and way over budget.
“Project estimates between 1910 and 1998 were short of the final costs an average of 28 percent,” according to The New York Times, summarizing our findings. “The biggest errors were in rail projects, which ran, on average, 45 percent over estimated costs [in inflation-adjusted dollars]. Bridges and tunnels were 34 percent over; roads, 20 percent. Nine of 10 estimates were low, the study said.”[
“Iron Law of Megaprojects”: over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over again.
The probability that any big project will blow its budget and schedule and deliver disappointing benefits is very high and very reliable.
In total, only 8.5 percent of projects hit the mark on both cost and time. And a minuscule 0.5 percent nail cost, time, and benefits. Or to put that another way, 91.5 percent of projects go over budget, over schedule, or both. And 99.5 percent of projects go over budget, over schedule, under benefits, or some combination of these.
Actual mean cost overrun of a major building project is 62 percent.
My database revealed that information technology projects have fat tails. To illustrate, 18 percent of IT projects have cost overruns above 50 percent in real terms. And for those projects the average overrun is 447 percent! That’s the average in the tail, meaning that many IT projects in the tail have even higher overruns than this. Information technology is truly fat-tailed![16] So are nuclear storage projects. And the Olympic Games. And nuclear power plants. And big hydroelectric dams. As are airports, defense projects, big buildings, aerospace projects, tunnels, mining projects, high-speed rail, urban rail, conventional rail, bridges, oil projects, gas projects, and water projects.
In fact, most project types have fat tails.
From the dramatic to the mundane to the trivial, change can rattle or ruin a project—if it occurs during the window of time when the project is ongoing. Solution? Close the window.
Of course, a project can’t be completed instantly, so we can’t close the window entirely. But we can make the opening radically smaller by speeding up the project and bringing it to a conclusion faster. That is a main means of reducing risk on any project. In sum, keep it short!
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 is a simplification, but it works: first, planning; second, delivery. The terminology varies by industry—in movies,
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.
Planning requires thinking—and creative, critical, careful thinking is slow.
Rome’s first emperor, the mighty Caesar Augustus, whose personal motto was “Festina lente,” or “Make haste slowly.”
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. “Lock-in,” as scholars refer to it, is the notion that although there may be alternatives, most people and organizations behave as if they have no choice but to push on, even past the point where they put themselves at more cost or risk than they would have accepted at the start.
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.
“Act in haste, repent at leisure” is a centuries-old chestnut
“Optimism is widespread, stubborn, and costly,” observed Kahneman.
The physicist and writer Douglas Hofstadter mockingly dubbed it “Hofstadter’s Law”: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”
Forty years ago, Kahneman and Tversky showed that people commonly underestimate the time required to complete tasks even when there is information available that suggests the estimate is unreasonable. They called this the “planning fallacy
“Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.” Notice, however, that Bezos carefully limited the bias for action to decisions that are “reversible.”
“Especially when under time pressure, they perceive planning to be wasted effort.”
To put that in more general behavioral terms, people in power, which includes executives deciding about big projects, prefer to go with the quick flow of availability bias, as opposed to the slow effort of planning.
It isn’t the bias for action promoted by Jeff Bezos; it’s a bias against thinking.
When the Montreal Olympics went a spectacular 720 percent over budget, a cartoonist gleefully drew a heavily pregnant Mayor Drapeau. But so what? Drapeau got his Olympics. And although it took more than thirty years for Montreal to pay off the mountain of debt, the onus was on the taxpayers of Montreal and Quebec. Drapeau wasn’t even voted out of office; he retired in 1986.
In that first, almost comically rushed week, Somervell presented his plan to the secretary of war, a congressional subcommittee, and the White House cabinet, including the president. Each time, so few probing questions were asked that the blatant flaws in the plan were not revealed. And each time, the plan was quickly approved.
In that first, almost comically rushed week, Somervell presented his plan to the secretary of war, a congressional subcommittee, and the White House cabinet, including the president. Each time, so few probing questions were asked that the blatant flaws in the plan were not revealed. And each time, the plan was quickly approved. Somervell’s superiors simply didn’t do their jobs.
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.
Slow isn’t good in itself. Like David and Deborah, people can spend years daydreaming about a project but have nothing more than daydreams to show for it, just as organizations can burn enormous amounts of time holding meetings filled with meandering discussions that never go anywhere. Moreover, careful analysis like that done by David’s architect can be laborious and take ages, but if it is too narrowly focused, it won’t reveal fundamental flaws in the plan or gaps, much less correct them. And by its impressive detail, it may give the false idea that the overall plan is stronger than it is, like a beautiful facade with no structure behind it.
Frank Gehry, arguably the world’s most acclaimed architect, never starts with answers. “I grew up with the Talmud,” he told me when I interviewed him in 2021, “and the Talmud starts with a question.” That’s typical of Judaism, he says. “Jews question everything.”
Projects are not goals in themselves. Projects are how goals are achieved.
Jeff Bezos was well aware of that danger, and he came up with an elegant way to keep Amazon focused on customers, which is the company’s primary creed. Bezos noted that when a project is successfully completed and it’s ready to be publicly announced, the conventional last step is to have the communications department write two documents. One is a very short press release (PR) that summarizes what the new product or service is and why it is valuable for customers. The other is a “frequently asked questions” (FAQ) document with more details about costs, functionality, and other concerns. Bezos’s brainstorm was to make that last step in a conventional project the first step in Amazon projects.
People are terrible at getting things right the first time. But we’re great at tinkering. Wise planners make the most of this basic insight into human nature. They try, learn, and do it again. They plan like Pixar and Frank Gehry do.
“Repetitio est mater studiorum”—“Repetition is the mother of learning.”
A good plan is one that meticulously applies experimentation or experience. A great plan is one that rigorously applies both.
The Australian art critic Robert Hughes described Jørn Utzon’s entry in the design competition as “nothing more than a magnificent doodle.”[7] That’s a little exaggerated, but not much. Utzon’s entry was so sparse that it didn’t even satisfy all the technical requirements set by the organizers, but his simple sketches were indisputably brilliant—perhaps too brilliant. They mesmerized the jury and swept objections aside, leaving a host of unanswered questions.
The principal mystery lay in the curved shells at the heart of Utzon’s vision. They were beautiful on two-dimensional paper, but what three-dimensional constructs would enable them to stand? What materials would they be made of? How would they be built? None of that had been figured out. Utzon hadn’t even consulted engineers.
The first, small step is an outline of roughly twelve pages explaining how the idea can be the basis of a story. “It’s mostly a description of what happens. Where are we? What’s going on? What happens in the story?,” said Docter. That is given to a group of Pixar employees—directors, writers, artists, and executives.
Such failure is so common in Silicon Valley that there is even a name for it. “Vaporware” is software that is publicly touted but never released because developers can’t figure out how to make the hype real.
In Silicon Valley, the standard approach for startups is to release a product quickly, even if it is far from perfect, then continue developing the product in response to consumer feedback.
When a minimum viable product approach isn’t possible, try a “maximum virtual product”—a hyperrealistic, exquisitely detailed model
Experience is invaluable. But too often it is overlooked or dismissed for other considerations. Or it is simply misunderstood and marginalized. Here’s how to avoid that.
But the state decided not to go that way. Instead, it hired a large number of mostly inexperienced, mostly US contractors and oversaw them with managers who also had little or no experience with high-speed rail.[2] That’s a terrible way to run a project. But it’s common—because it’s good politics.
A Canadian example is arguably even more egregious. When the Canadian government decided it wanted to buy two icebreakers, it didn’t buy them from manufacturers in other countries that were more experienced with building icebreakers, deciding instead to give the contracts to Canadian companies. That’s national politics. But rather than give the contracts to one company so that it could build one ship, learn from the experience, and deliver the second ship more efficiently, it gave one contract to one company and the other to another company. Splitting the contract “will not lead to these natural learning improvements,” noted a report by the parliamentary budget officer, Yves Giroux—a report that found that the estimated cost of the icebreakers had soared from $2.6 billion (Canadian) to $7.25 billion.
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.
Seattle placed a custom order and the machine was duly designed, built, and delivered. That cost $80 million, which is more than double the price of a standard boring machine. After boring a thousand feet of a tunnel that would be nine thousand feet long, the borer broke down and became the world’s biggest cork in a bottle. Extracting it from the tunnel, repairing it, and getting it back to work took two years and cost another $143 million. Seattle’s new underground highway, needless to say, was completed late and over budget, with pending litigation making further overruns likely. If the city had instead chosen to drill two standard-sized tunnels, it could have used off-the-shelf drilling equipment that had already been widely used and was therefore more reliable, and they could have hired teams experienced at running these machines. But politicians wouldn’t have been able to brag about the size of the tunnel.
The German philosopher Friedrich von Schelling called architecture “frozen music.”
9] It’s a lovely and memorable phrase, so I’m going to adapt it: Technology is “frozen experience.” If
Technology is “frozen experience.”
If we see technology this way, it is clear that, other things being equal, project planners should prefer highly experienced technology for the same reason house builders should prefer highly experienced carpenters. But we often don’t see technology this way. Too often, we assume that newer is better.
Every Olympic Games since 1960 for which data are available, summer and winter, has gone over budget. The average overrun is 157 percent in real terms.
The Olympic motto is “Faster, higher, stronger,” and host cities aspire to their own superlatives in constructing facilities.
When Roger Taillibert died in 2019, the obituary in the Montreal Gazette opened by noting that the Olympic stadium had cost so much that “it took 30 years” for Quebec to pay it off. “And more than four decades later, it is still plagued by a roof that does not work.”
But another factor was his insistence that the project use existing, proven technologies “in order to avoid the uncertainty of innovative methods.”[16] That included avoiding “hand work” whenever possible and replacing it with parts designed “so that they could be duplicated in tremendous quantity with almost perfect accuracy,” Lamb wrote, “and brought to the building and put together like an automobile on the assembly line.”
“We can know more than we can tell.”
But as the scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi showed, 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. As Polanyi wrote, “We can know more than we can tell.”
Highly experienced project leaders like Frank Gehry and Pete Docter overflow with tacit knowledge about the many facets of the big projects they oversee. It improves their judgment profoundly. Often, they will feel that something is wrong or that there is a better way without quite being able to say why. As a large research literature shows, the intuitions of such experts are, under the right conditions, highly reliable. They can even be astonishingly accurate,
Practical wisdom is what Aristotle called “phronesis.” He held it in higher regard than any other virtue, “for the possession of the single virtue of phronesis will carry with it the possession of them all [i.e., all the relevant virtues],” as he emphasized.
In short, if you have phronesis, you’ve got it all. Therefore, a project leader with abundant phronesis is the single greatest asset a project can have. If you have a project, hire a leader like that.
Remove the words custom and bespoke from your vocabulary. They’re a desirable option for Italian tailoring if you can afford it, not for big projects.
When delivery fails, efforts to figure out why tend to focus exclusively on delivery. That’s understandable, but it’s a mistake, because the root cause of why delivery fails often lies outside delivery, in forecasting, years before delivery was even begun.
Have made a forecast the same way and come up with a similar
Weeks each in Caro’s case. That’s the “anchor.” Then you slide the figure up or down as seems
In psychology, the process Caro used to create his forecast is known as “anchoring and adjustment.”[6] Your estimate starts with some fixed point, twelve chapters of three weeks each in Caro’s case. That’s the “anchor.” Then you slide the figure up or down as seems reasonable, to one year for Caro. That’s “adjustment.” Caro was exactly right to call his thinking “naïve but perhaps not unnatural” because, as abundant research shows, anchoring and adjustment, particularly when immediate experience is used as the anchor, is a natural way of thinking. It’s likely that most people in Caro’s position, with his specific experience, would have made a forecast the same way and come up with a similar result.
Final estimates made this way are biased toward the anchor, so a low anchor produces a lower estimate than a high anchor does. That means the quality of the anchor is critical. Use a good anchor, and you greatly improve your chance of making a good forecast; use a bad anchor, get a bad forecast.
Much subsequent research revealed that people will anchor in almost any number they happen to be exposed to prior to making their forecast.
In big organizations there’s almost always somebody with a sense of realism. But they were lone voices.
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 overruns at all; it is underestimation. This project was doomed by a large underestimate. And the underestimate was caused by a bad anchor.
To understand what a reference class is, bear in mind that there are two fundamentally different ways to look at a project.
The first is to see it as its own special undertaking. All projects are special to some degree.
This is the “uniqueness bias” we encountered in the previous chapter.
Cultural anthropologist 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.
An opera house may be one of a kind because of its design and location, but it still has plenty in common with other opera houses, and we can learn a lot about how to construct a particular opera house by looking at opera houses in general and considering our opera house to be “one of those.” The category of opera houses is the reference class.
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. I came to call this process “reference-class forecasting” (RCF).
Using reference-class forecasting is “the single most important piece of advice regarding how to increase accuracy in forecasting through improved methods.”
“This time is different” is the motto of uniqueness bias.
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;
Interestingly, early delays are not seen as a big deal by most project leaders. 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.”
And the answers are right under your nose in the tail of the reference class; you just need to dig them out.
As with reference-class forecasting, the big hurdle to black swan management is overcoming uniqueness bias. If you imagine that your project is so different from other projects that you have nothing to learn from them, you will overlook risks that you would catch and mitigate if you instead switched to the outside view.
“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.
Black swans are not fate. We are not at their mercy. That said, it is important to acknowledge that risk mitigation—like most things in life—is a matter of probability, not certainty.
Empire State Building struggled to attract paying tenants and was nicknamed the “Empty State Building” during the 1930s.
Hirschman argued that planning is a bad idea. “Creativity always comes as a surprise to us,” he wrote. “Therefore, we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened.” But if we know that big projects pose big challenges that can be overcome only by creativity and we don’t trust creativity to deliver its magic when we need it, why would anyone ever launch a big project?
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.
Little of that was Utzon’s fault. But he was the architect, so he was blamed and fired midconstruction. He left Australia in secret and in disgrace. His reputation was ruined. Instead of being showered with commissions to build more masterpieces, Utzon was marginalized and forgotten. He became what no masterbuilder wants to be or deserves to be. He became a one-building architect.
Indeed, there’s reason to think that desperation may actually hinder the imaginative moments that elevate a project to glory. Psychologists have studied the effects of stress on creativity for decades, and there is now a substantial literature showing that it has a largely—though not entirely—negative effect.
Imaginative leaps belong in planning, not delivery. When stakes and stress are low, we are freer to wonder, try, and experiment. Planning is creativity’s natural habitat.
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?
A strong plan greatly increases the probability of a swift and successful delivery. But it’s not enough. As any experienced project manager will tell you, you also need a capable
A strong plan greatly increases the probability of a swift and successful delivery. But it’s not enough. As any experienced project manager will tell you, you also need a capable, determined delivery team. The success of any project depends on getting the team right—“getting the right people on the bus,” as one colleague metaphorically put it, “and placing them in the right seats,” as another added.
There are five project types that are not fat-tailed. That means they may come in somewhat late or over budget but it’s very unlikely that they will go disastrously wrong. The fortunate five? They are solar power, wind power, fossil thermal power (power plants that generate electricity by burning fossil fuels), electricity transmission, and roads.
Nuclear power plants are one of the worst-performing project types in my database, with an average cost overrun of 120 percent in real terms and schedules running 65 percent longer than planned. Even worse, they are at risk of fat-tail extremes for both cost and schedule, meaning they may go 20 or 30 percent over budget. Or 200 or 300 percent. Or 500 percent. Or more.
First, you can’t build a nuclear power plant quickly, run it for a while, see what works and what doesn’t, then change the design to incorporate the lessons learned. It’s too expensive and dangerous. That means that experimentation—one-half of the experiri I discussed in chapter 4—is out. You have no choice but to get it right the first time.
Second, there’s a problem with experience—the other half of experiri. If you are building a nuclear power plant, chances are that you haven’t done much of that before for the simple reason that few have been built and each takes many years to complete, so opportunities to develop experience are scarce.
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.
Latin saying goes, “Repetitio est mater studiorum”—“Repetition is the mother of learning.”
Manufacturing in a factory and assembling on-site is far more efficient than traditional construction because a factory is a controlled environment designed to be as efficient, linear, and predictable as possible.
The technical term for this property is “scale free,” meaning that the thing is basically the same no matter what size it is. This gives you the magic of what I call “scale-free scalability,” meaning you can scale up or down following the same principles independently of where you are scalewise, which is exactly what you want in order to build something huge with ease.
Back in 2017, before it really ramped up, I estimated that between $6 trillion and $9 trillion per year would be spent globally on giant projects in the following decade. That estimate was conservative compared to others, which went as high as $22 trillion per year.
If the dismal record of big projects were improved even a little—by cutting the cost by a mere 5 percent, say—$300 billion to $400 billion would be saved per year.
Whereas a turbine in 2000 might have been a little taller than the Statue of Liberty and able to power 1,500 homes, a turbine in 2017 was almost double that height and capable of powering 7,100 homes.
In 2017, with oil and gas vanishing from its business, Ørsted took its new name in honor of the Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted, who discovered electromagnetism.
“Think slow, act fast” is an example of a heuristic.
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. Wise people, including successful project leaders—plus your grandmother and anyone else with phronesis—work to refine and improve their heuristics throughout life.
Sometimes say that this is my only heuristic because the masterbuilder—named after the skilled masons who built Europe’s medieval cathedrals—possesses all the phronesis needed to make your project happen.
GET YOUR TEAM RIGHT This is the only heuristic cited by every project leader I’ve ever met.
“WHY?” Asking why you’re doing your project will focus you on what matters, your ultimate purpose, and your result. This goes into the box on the right of your project chart. As the project sails into a storm of events and details, good leaders never lose sight of the ultimate result. “No matter where I am and what I’m doing in the delivery process,” noted Andrew Wolstenholme, the leader who delivered Heathrow’s Terminal 5 in chapter 8, “I check myself constantly by asking whether my present actions effectively contribute to the result on the right.”
Big is best built from small. Bake one small cake. Bake another. And another. Then stack them.
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
KNOW THAT YOUR BIGGEST RISK IS YOU