shriker.caThere’s a book that’s basically a love letter to everyone who’s ever watched a project go sideways for fourteen months because nobody bothered to talk to the person one desk over. I can already tell you that How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner is my 2023 book of the year.
This is the first book I have read that I can point to as a reference for my decision-making thought process.
The Data Does not Care About Your Optimism#
Flyvbjerg has built a database of over 16,000 projects. Bridges, tunnels, IT systems, nuclear plants, the Olympics. The kind of ledger that makes you want to lie down in a quiet room and stare at the ceiling. And the headline number is this: only 8.5% of projects land on budget and on time. And if you want on budget and on time and the thing actually delivers what it promised?
0.5%.
That’s not a bad year. That’s the exception.
They call it the Iron Law of Megaprojects, and it’s the rule, not the exception. Over budget, over time, under benefit. The data makes no allowance for the fact that your boss padded the budget by 30% to be safe. It’s still over.
I respect this. It fails in a known, predictable way, which means you can build around it.
Why we Keep Doing it Anyway#
Two reasons, and neither is flattering.
First, optimism bias. We build our budgets around the best-case scenario because the best-case scenario is the only one we can feel good about pitching. Second, and this one makes me want to scream into a pillow: strategic misrepresentation. Leaders deliberately understate the cost and inflate the benefit just to get the project approved and the funding unlocked.
That’s not a mistake. That’s a heist.
Projects don’t fail a little. They fail in fat tails. Extreme, catastrophic outcomes are way more common than a bell curve would ever predict. The longer you drag this out, the bigger the target you’re holding up to black swans. A labour strike. A supply chain collapse. A change of government mid-project.
That’s what they call the Window of Doom, and it’s the execution phase where every single open day is an open door to something going wrong.
Think slow. Act fast.#
The whole book boils down to this, and I think it should be tattooed on the forehead of every project lead.
We do the opposite. We rush to execution because watching dirt move and code ship feels like progress. Planning feels like stalling. So we start building while the blueprints are half-finished.
Sydney Opera House did this. Rushed to dig before the roof engineering was even solved, then had to dynamite and rebuild the foundation. A decade of delays and a 1,400% budget overrun.
That’s the inside-out mistake in a single case study.
The counter is Frank Gehry and the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Radical titanium design, so he simulated every single piece in aerospace software before a single physical action. When it was finally time to build, the plan was bulletproof. On time. On budget.
Planning is cheap. You break things on paper for free. Execution is expensive. You break things in the real world where it costs money, time, and your reputation. So you stay in the cheap phase as long as humanly possible, iterate, simulate, and stress-test.
Then you slam the door and go fast.
Take the Outside View#
This is my favourite piece, and it’s borrowed from Daniel Kahneman. It’s called reference class forecasting, and it’s basically a reality check with teeth.
Everyone plans from the inside view. You look at your project, add up your materials, assume things will go reasonably well, and arrive at your number. This method mathematically guarantees a budget overrun.
The outside view says: your project is not unique. Someone has done this exact thing before, in your city, last year, with the same contractor and the same weather. So go find twenty or fifty of those projects. Ask what they actually spent, not what they budgeted. Average those real numbers. That’s your baseline.
That’s it. Not a Gantt chart. Not another dashboard. A conversation with people who’ve already been in the mud.
Which, by the way, is exactly the lesson I keep relearning in the enterprise: you might have all the expertise you need on the team already.
Build with Lego#
Not every project carries the same risk, and this is where the book gets genuinely practical.
Solar and wind farms almost always finish on time and on budget. Nuclear plants and the Olympics routinely go off a cliff. The difference is modularity.
A wind farm is the same standardized turbine repeated a hundred times. Build the first one, learn something, and by the twentieth you’re fast and cheap and less risky. A nuclear plant is one bespoke interconnected monster where any single failure stops the whole site.
If you can click your project together like Lego blocks instead of sculpting a single custom monument, you can scale up without scaling the risk. I’ll note that software figured this out years ago with microservices. The physical world is still catching up. Don’t let that make you smug. We’re all lagging somewhere and one size does not fit all.
Hire the Grey Hair#
We have a cultural obsession with the brilliant novice. The fresh outsider who disrupts the rules and builds something extraordinary. The data says that narrative is poison for big projects.
For execution, experience is the only metric that actually moves the needle. Flyvbjerg is blunt: never hire someone doing this for the first time. You don’t want a brilliant theorist. You want a master builder who’s executed this exact type of project a half-dozen times and already knows where the bodies are buried.
Because they’ve lived the fat tails. They don’t need to guess what goes wrong. They’ve seen it go wrong.
My Take#
This is a strategy book, not a tactics book. It’s not going to hand you a Gantt chart template or a daily standup script. If that’s what you came for, you can skip it. But if you run big projects, or you’re about to build a house, or you’re planning a launch that will quietly make or break you, this one’s for you.
The lasting idea is a flip of how we see action. We’re wired to think planning is procrastination and digging is progress. This book proves that rushing to start is the actual failure of leadership. Real speed is the reward for patience.
Read it. Take the outside view. Add more to your problem-solving toolbelt.
And for the love of all that is holy, talk to the people outside your circles and learn about how things have been done in the past. There are so many lessons to learn. You’re not being slow. You’re being expensive.