[Book Club] How big things get done?
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
Bent Flyvbjerg
Three-Sentence Summary
Most big projects have fat-tailed cost overruns and benefit under-runs distribution. The key principle for success is “think slow, act fast.” This includes iterative detailed planning, proper risk management, hire the right team and masterbuilder.
Who Is This Book For?
There is a saying in Chinese describing a type of boss. “决策拍脑袋，表态拍胸脯，事后拍屁股”. It literally translates to “Make decisions with a slap to the head, make promises with a slap to the chest, and walk away with a slap to the butt afterward.” Or in other words “Making decisions impulsively, making bold statements, and shirking responsibility afterward.”
This book is for them. And, all project leaders who want to re-calibrate the ambition.
Major Concepts
I have participated in too many meetings at work. I am ashamed of that. But it is a separate topic. One of the most common statements regarding the delivery time of a product is “I needed it yesterday.” A joke that makes everyone in the meeting relaxed. While at the same time, sets the tone of the project. Start early, develop fast, deploy onsite, and work perfectly on the first try. It swirls the project team together with stakeholders into a tornado of reckless excitement.
Bent Flyvbjerg, the author, has studied hundreds and thousands of mega-projects across different sectors. The most astonishing finding is that “91.5% of projects go over budget, over schedule, under benefits, or some combination of these.” And almost all projects’ cost overruns are fat-tail distributed. A shocking example is IT projects. In the tail of the distribution, the mean overrun is more than 400%.
The major concept for avoiding dragging and cost-exploded projects is “Think slow, act fast.”
One of the most insightful quotes of the book explains the spirit of “think slow” in a very concrete way. It is an excerpt about how the Empire State Building was successfully finished on time and on quality.
In a 1931 publication, the corporation boasted that before any work had been done on the construction site “the architects knew exactly how many beams and of what lengths, even how many rivets and bolts would be needed. They knew how many windows Empire State would have, how many blocks of limestone, and of what shapes and sizes, how many tons of aluminum and stainless steel, tons of cement, tons of mortar. Even before it was begun, Empire State was finished entirely — on paper.”
This is the level of planning all projects have to achieve. Naturally, it needs experienced (in the exact or related fields) project leaders, a united and determined team that the project leader trusts in, and rigorous iterations of the product. I will not go deep here. Especially the last part has been well covered by The Lean Startup. In a later post, I will talk about partnership and supplier management based on my learnings.
The second part of the motto is “act fast.” This is greatly linked to risk management. Project duration increases risk exposure. Longer projects are more vulnerable to unexpected issues, including major disruption. In complex systems, these disruptions occur frequently enough to be considered “normal accidents.” The core project member is leaving the project. The global supplier chain is frozen due to a 77-meter-wide canal. The pandemic puts transportation on hold worldwide. You name it. Managing this type of black swan risk starts with acknowledging their occurrence possibility. Then address them in the plan.
Up to this point, experienced project leaders might already want to speak up. “What you’re trying to say, is clear to me. I know the right approach is to plan and iterate until all components are mature. Probably most of the managers also know that. But projects are typically purposefully wrongly pitched, and thus, wrongly cascaded to the project team.” I know what you mean. I will use again another quote to put this under the spot.
The French architect Jean Nouvel, a winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, was blunt about the purpose of most cost estimates for signature architecture. “In France, there is often a theoretical budget that is given because it is the sum that politically has been released to do something. In three out of four cases this sum does not correspond to anything in technical terms. This is a budget that was made because it could be accepted politically. The real price comes later. The politicians make the real price public where they want and when they want.” … ”We always knew the initial estimate was under the real cost. Just like we never had a real cost for any project,” said by a retired American politician. “If we gave the true expected outcome costs nothing would be built.”
I struggle with this, too. As a matter of fact, my team suffers partially from the consequences of Strategic Misrepresentation. It originates from bosses who “make decisions impulsively, make bold statements, and shirk responsibility afterward.” Projects dragged on, and costs exploded. More and more of them doing this to budget gatekeepers. Eventually, gatekeepers didn’t trust any request. And the wallet opens smaller and smaller.
Untie this vicious cycle needs either a star project leader or a deep-pocketed customer. However, complex projects also mean long cycles inefficient experience feedback loop, few successful examples, and money burner. All in all, it is challenging. There is no clear or effective solution proposed in the book. What we can do is only fight through the current predicament as elegantly and dignified as possible.
Or we can share this book or this post with as many bosses as possible. Any change starts from awareness of the problem.