How Big Things Get Done

And what is a big thing? A big thing is relative to who you are and what your circumstances are. If you are a giant multinational then indeed that may mean a big thing may be erecting an enormous skyscraper, but if you’re a small business that may be designing a new product or hosting a convention.

If you are a homeowner, it may be a kitchen renovation because if you’ve ever tried a kitchen renovation at home you know that they can become big and complicated, expensive, they’re ambitious relative to you and your circumstances, and so that’s really how we define what a big thing is. It’s any project that is ambitious, complex, difficult, and potentially risky to whoever happens to be undertaking it.

Rachel Salaman: And because of that I think your book would appeal to lots and lots of different people. You co-wrote the book with Bent Flyvbjerg, an Oxford University professor who’s been called the world’s leading mega-project expert. In fact, the book is written in his voice in the first person, even though you’re both listed as co-authors. How did your collaboration come about?

Dan Gardner: Yeah, well, I’ve written many books about psychology and decision making, and the really interesting thing is, well, Bent knows my work and as much as you may think that because Bent is an expert on mega-projects, he is therefore an expert in concrete and steel and the technologies surrounding mega-projects, really at the core of his work, and at the core of every ambitious project, is in fact people.

It’s people, it’s planning, it’s decision making, and in fact it’s the people that are the really crucial element. It’s the people that will make or break the project.

And so Bent got in touch with me because, of course, people, that’s my jam, that’s what I do, and then we started collaborating on this book and looking for those universal elements, those elements of big projects that are true across no matter what the type of project is, no matter what the scale is, those universal elements, and as I say, at the top of that list is people and people’s decision making.

Rachel Salaman: Yes. The book is packed with examples and data, and a lot of it does come from Bent’s own research. Could you give us an idea of the scale of his experience and expertise?

Dan Gardner: Oh yeah, so Bent has been working, I mean, he’s got a longer career than this, but he’s been working in the field specifically of mega-projects for at least 30 years, and he started with this very basic insight which was: How common is project success and failure among these big, ambitious projects?

And what he discovered – and this was in the 1990s, what he discovered was that there was really no good answer for that. People hadn’t collected the data in a careful, rigorous fashion and they hadn’t done it across project types. And so that’s what Bent started doing and he started compiling data into a database, which is now the world’s largest of its kind, of project outcomes.

So, they’re measuring, there are three basic promises that every big project makes, which is it’s going to cost a certain amount of money, it’s going to take a certain amount of time, and it’s going to deliver certain benefits. Things like passengers moved or conference attendees attending, that sort of thing.

And so Bent has been collecting these data for project outcomes around the world into this database, and this database is now absolutely huge. It has, the data come from more than 160 countries around the world. They come in, I believe it’s 24 project categories.

These are big broad project categories, all sorts of things, everything ranging from information technology to the Olympic Games to highways to hydroelectric dams and so on. In all, there are more than 16,000 individual project outcome entries in this database and the topline conclusions that we can draw from that database are pretty sobering.

I don’t think anybody’s going to be surprised if we say that many projects come in over budget and over time, but I don’t think people realize quite how bad the record is. In fact, if you compile all those data and you boil them all down to three numbers, you’d ask what percentage of projects come in on budget and the answer is just a little under half.

What percentage of projects come in on budget and on time, that’s about 8.5 percent, which is not good. What percentage of projects comes in on budget, on time, and they deliver the benefits that they promised, which is the whole reason you did a project in the first place? The answer there is 0.5 percent, basically a rounding error.

Even if we’re generous, we round up to 1 percent, that means 99 percent of projects do not deliver on all three of their core promises. That’s a really bad track record and basically, we make the argument that we can easily do substantially better, and in doing substantially better we can save an enormous amount of money which will allow us to do much more.

Rachel Salaman: Yes. And one key tip that runs throughout the book is the idea of think slow, act fast. What does that look like in practice?

Dan Gardner: Right. So, think slow, act fast is of course the reverse of what you don’t want to do which is think fast, act slow, and unfortunately think fast, act slow is actually a pretty good summary of the typical pattern of major projects.

And what I mean by think fast, act slow is that people engage in quick superficial planning; it’s the sort of planning that does not reveal problems that could have been revealed and therefore does not come up with solutions to those problems in advance, in planning. So, people engage in quick superficial planning and then they start delivering.

That’s shovels in the ground and now you’re digging a big hole, and people get very excited because, well, look at the size of the hole, that’s progress, we’re making progress, this is exciting and we’re moving on.

Well, if you engage in quick superficial planning, the problems that you did not discover and you did not solve do not go away. They will eventually surface during delivery, and of course there will also be surprises, things that you couldn’t have anticipated. They will also pop up; they will also call for solutions and you’ll have to manage them as well.

And the project which starts with a great rush, it’s a great sprint and we’re all very excited and we’re making such progress, it starts to bog down and it gets worse and it gets worse and it gets worse, and by the end the delivery is slow and painful. It’s a long slog. That’s how you go way over schedule, that’s how you blow your budget, and you ultimately don’t deliver the benefits.

So that’s think fast, act slow. Of course, what we’re calling for is to reverse that to say think slow, act fast which is to say engage in slow, careful, iterative planning which reveals the problems that you weren’t aware of so that you can find the solutions in planning. And why is that so important? Because planning is safe, right?

You don’t have construction crews out working. You don’t have all sorts of other big expensive operations underway. Planning is like a safe harbor. Planning is the place for you to try out ideas, to try and work out new solutions to see if they work.

The more that you can identify problems that will inevitably arise in planning and find their solution in planning, the stronger your plan becomes, and only when you have a rock-solid plan that you are convinced can deliver on budget and on time do you then move to delivery.

So, you’re spending an enormous amount of time and effort and money in planning before you even think about delivery, and that is the pattern which we see in successful projects, from Frank Gehry to Pixar movies, all sorts of them. We see excellent, excellent planning which leads to a smooth delivery, and a smooth delivery is a fast delivery. So, think slow, act fast.

Rachel Salaman: It makes so much sense when you lay it out like that. It makes you wonder what stops people from planning properly. What can they do to plan better to avoid problems down the line?

Dan Gardner: This is the $64,000 question, to use an old American reference. What I’ve just suggested, let me just fully acknowledge that what I’ve just suggested is the solution to big projects is not at all counterintuitive. It is not surprising. It’s saying plan better and that will lead to smoother and swifter delivery. Everybody knows that.

There are old sayings to that effect – “measure twice, cut once” is an old one. In fact, this advice is so old that there is a Roman emperor whose personal motto was “make haste slowly,” so this is ancient, ancient advice. And so, the really powerful question then becomes, well, if it’s so ancient and if it’s so commonsensical, why don’t we do it?

And so, in the book we identify a couple of the causes. One is politics. Very often it suits the interests of people and organizations to engage in quick superficial planning, so if you’re a company and you want the project to go ahead and you want to land that contract, lowballing the bid by ignoring problems by engaging in quick superficial planning can be quite a useful strategy. It will cause problems down the road, but it will land you the contract.

Another big problem is culture. Business culture very often values doing, not planning. Planning is looked down on. Planning is paperwork, planning is flowcharts. You’ve got to get going, you’ve got to get doing, we want to see a larger and larger hole – that’s progress.

So that doesn’t help, but the fundamental problem is psychology, that if you examine the fundamentals of human psychology and decision making, they all lean towards excessive optimism and excessive belief that you have it all figured out and excessive belief that you’ve got the solutions and you are therefore ready to go.

And so, as a result you have politics and culture and psychology all encouraging us to engage in quick superficial planning and just get going, start with the delivery.

So, we have to recognize that those forces are at work in order to counteract them. Then once you’ve done that, you can say to yourself: “Okay, I’m not going to fall into that trap, right? I’m going to” – we call it “commit to not commit.” Early on, you’re not going to immediately say “I know what the plan is. Let’s just get on with it.”

I’m not going to fall into that trap. I’m going to start to engage in this slow careful planning process that will result in a better plan and therefore a better delivery and a better outcome. And what does that better planning process look like? Well, it starts with asking “why?”

We interviewed at length Frank Gehry, the famous Canadian-American architect, and Frank Gehry starts every single project exactly the same way – the client comes to Frank Gehry, and by the way, for listeners who don’t know, Frank Gehry is a visionary, he produces wild, crazy buildings, the sort of buildings you’ve never seen before, so people often imagine that Frank Gehry is the sort of person you just hand a blank check to and somehow, he just dreams up these crazy ideas out of thin air.

His process could not be more different than that. So, what happens is a client will come to Frank Gehry and say “Frank Gehry, I want you to build one of your crazy buildings for me and I want it to be visionary and majestic.” And the very first thing Frank Gehry will say is “Why do you want to do this project?”

And Frank Gehry will spend a lot of time talking about the client: “What do you want? What do you value? What’s your ultimate goal?” The reason why that’s so essential is we don’t engage in projects in order to have the things that the projects produce. We don’t build bridges to have bridges; we don’t build roads to have roads. We build bridges because they deliver some benefit; we build roads because they deliver some benefit.

And so Frank Gehry at the very beginning of the project spends an enormous amount of time talking about “What exactly are the benefits that you’re hoping for from this project? What are the problems you want to solve? What are the good things you want to bring into the world? Let’s talk about that.”

And he puts the focus on that, and as a result he’s able to refine the project so that it is aligned to achieve the goals that are the real purpose of the project. And again, that sounds like something you might say: “Well, isn’t that common sense? They already do it.” And I assure you it may be common sense, but it’s not common. People in fact routinely skip that step.

So that’s the very first fundamental step. The second step is, now I’ve been talking about planning and when people hear the word planning, they imagine flowcharts, they imagine meetings, they imagine you’re writing reports, you stack up the paperwork, it’s a very bureaucratic sort of exercise. But that’s not at all what we mean by planning in this book.

What we mean by planning in this book is an experiential process. Human beings are wonderful experiential learners: try something, see what happens. If it blows up, well, don’t do that again, but if it works nicely then you can put that in your toolkit, try that again.

We’re excellent experiential learners, but we’re really, really bad at trying to figure out a complex problem and coming up with a solution to that complex problem at the first go. So, you don’t want to be putting yourself in that position. So instead, what you want is a planning process that basically creates experiential learning.

And so let me use Frank Gehry as an illustration again. He starts by sketching out a little idea and then he thinks about it and he talks about it with other people, and then he does another sketch and then he does another sketch and another sketch.

And then he starts to move to models, and he uses crude models with wooden blocks and cardboard cutouts and they’re very simple models, but again he’s engaging this sort of iterative process – “Well, if I tried this, what would it look like? If I tried that, what would that do?” Then he moves that into the digital space, and Frank Gehry was a pioneer in this way.

He creates a digital model that he’s working on now and he’s now doing exactly the same thing. He’s trying an idea, seeing what happens, seeing what other people think, seeing what the implications are, tossing out ideas, adding ideas, and his rule is essentially he will continue to do this, making his digital model more and more tested and precise until such time as he is convinced that his model is so tested and so precise that it will allow for a quick smooth delivery.

And does this process work? Absolutely. His track record is stunning. He delivers on budget and on time over and over again, because he engages in precisely this iterative process. You see this in successful projects over and over and over again. They devote enormous amounts of time to the iterative learning planning process at the beginning, and only when they have a reliable, tested plan do they then move to delivery.

You’re listening to Expert Interview from Mind Tools.

Rachel Salaman: Those were some great examples, but wouldn’t this be expensive for a lot of companies to emulate because of the time involved?

Dan Gardner: Yes.

Rachel Salaman: What factors should play into the decision to stop experimenting and take something to market? I suppose ideally, you’d be 100 percent happy with how it is and then you would move forward, but what if you don’t have the time and money to take it to that point?

Dan Gardner: The first thing to bear in mind is you’re absolutely right. What I’ve described is expensive. It’s time consuming and it is expensive, but it is far, far, far cheaper than is getting into trouble during delivery. Because remember, this is in the planning process, you’re doing this on computers, you’re not doing this in the real world, and as a result you can afford to fail.

You can try ideas, you can fail, and if problems arise you can then go and find solutions at much less cost than if this happens in the real world. That’s number one. Number two is the concern that you’re raising is certainly one that you will hear if you go to Silicon Valley, for example.

In fact, I can tell you that when we started the research for this book and we were speaking to Silicon Valley types, they hate the word plan and planning. They don’t do planning. The big ethos in Silicon Valley is get a good enough product, get it out into the real world, get it before real customers so that they can try it out, see how it works.

You can then get that feedback and then you can revise your design according to the feedback. It’s perfectly fine to send out a buggy computer game in data form. It’s not perfectly acceptable to send out a new jet airplane that’s buggy because you can’t be learning from crashes. You don’t want to be learning from crashes when it comes to jet airplanes or buildings or anything else.

So, remember I said early on that human beings are great experiential learners? That’s the key to unraveling and making these components fit together. What Silicon Valley is doing when you, for instance, ship a video game with some bugs in it and then you learn from your customers what’s happening, what they’re doing is they’re engaging in an experiential learning process and they’re doing it in a great place which is the real world.

That is the ideal place. As I say, you can’t always do that, but they can do it, so they should do it. Frank Gehry is only doing this in digital simulation in-house because of course, as I say, Frank Gehry can’t build a building and then see if it falls down. He has to ensure the building only gets built once and that it never falls down. And so that’s why he’s doing it in the digital milieu.

But still fundamentally he’s doing the same thing as what Silicon Valley does. He’s engaged in an experiential learning process where he can test out ideas, see if they work, implement them if they work, remove them if they don’t, and incrementally make his product better and better. Silicon Valley is doing essentially the same thing; they’re just doing it in a different way.

Rachel Salaman: I think it’s helpful to mention something that you and Bent point out in the book, that the Latin word experire, if I’m pronouncing that right, is the root of both experiment and experience, so that brings those two things together, doesn’t it?

Dan Gardner: Yes, they’re fundamental and I was delighted, I’m a big etymology nerd, I was delighted to discover that they have common roots because it really tells us something, experience and experiment. How do you get experience? You get experience by experimenting. In other words, learn by doing. This is fundamental to the book and fundamental to what we think a good planning process is.

You learn by doing. You don’t learn by engaging in abstract thought. Human beings are just bad at that, and we can easily fool ourselves into thinking that we can design a plan which will work right the first time we ever implement it, but that almost never happens. We need to learn by doing and that’s what’s fundamental to a successful planning process.

Rachel Salaman: Your book includes some of the research of Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel laureate, and the author of the bestseller “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” You’ve talked a little bit about psychology already, but how else does psychology play into the success or failure of big projects?

Dan Gardner: Oh, it’s absolutely fundamental. Let me illustrate with, Daniel Kahneman came up with this amazing acronym called WYSIATI, and this one’s really pretty fundamental to human psychology. WYSIATI stands for What You See Is All There Is.

What WYSIATI means is whatever information you happen to have on hand right now, you will psychologically be inclined to treat as if that were all the information in the entire world, and therefore you will make a decision on the basis of that.

The reason why psychologically we do this is because that’s what enables us to make quick intuitive decisions and the quick intuitive decisions are what matter most in human psychology. And so that WYSIATI plays a huge role in why people engage in quick superficial planning and launch delivery too early.

Now if you look at the solutions to that quick superficial planning and the processes I laid out earlier, underlying them is the opposite of WYSIATI. I don’t know if I should try and labor the point, but it’s WYSINATI, it’s What You See Is Not All There Is.

So when Frank Gehry, the very first thing Frank Gehry does, even when a client comes in and says “Frank Gehry, I know exactly the project I want to do. Here is the project. Will you do this project for me, yes or no?” Frank Gehry will not say yes or no. He will start asking questions. He will try to learn more about who this person is, what their ultimate goals are.

And why does he do that? Because Frank Gehry is a master of WYSINATI. He assumes that there is more that he does not know and he wants to learn it. And similarly, when he’s engaged in that lengthy iterative planning process, why does he do that? Well, you wouldn’t do that if you assume that you know all there is to know.

No, what’s driving Frank Gehry to engage in that relentless exploration of ideas and iteration of ideas is the assumption that there is more that he doesn’t know. So, it’s a starting position of intellectual humility that says “I am a flawed human being. I think I know the answer, but I probably don’t. I need to learn more and think more.”

Rachel Salaman: One of the key tips in your book is to think of our projects as being built with Lego or some other small basic building block. Could you give us an example of what you mean by that?

Dan Gardner: Yeah, in Bent’s database there are a couple of project categories that really stand out; one in particular is extremely successful, it’s the gold standard of projects, and it is solar farms. They routinely come in on budget and on time. Now why is that? What is it about a solar farm that makes it so reliable?

If you think of those solar panels as being like Lego blocks you have the right idea. Basically, the concept here is modularity. Every solar panel is a module, you just add another one on, and it’s the same as in a Lego block system, right? The blocks are made in a factory. They’re identical. If you want to build something bigger, you just add more Lego blocks and you can build almost anything that way.

Modularity comes in degrees. Things are more modular and less modular; it’s not an either/or binary. But modularity, the genius of modularity and the reason why it delivers projects so successfully is repetition.

Remember all along I’ve been saying that human beings are fantastic experiential learners? Well, think about the person who goes down to the field and starts putting up those solar panels. You put up one. The first time you put up a solar panel, you know what, it’s going to be a little bit awkward. You’ve never done that before.

The second time you’ll be a little bit better. The third time you’ll be better. If you keep putting up solar panels and you’re now putting out 100 solar panels, 1000 solar panels, 10,000 solar panels, you’re going to get fantastic at putting up those solar panels, right? Your efficiency is going to shoot through the roof. You’ll get faster and cheaper. And that’s the genius of modularity – because you’re repeating something over and over again, you get better and better at it.

Now if you take the concept of modularity and you apply it with a little bit of imagination, it applies to a lot of projects which are not nearly as obviously modular as a solar farm. So, for example, the Empire State Building, one of the world’s most famous buildings, it was an incredibly successful project. It was constructed at an amazing speed and it was not only on budget, it was actually substantially under budget. So why was it so good?

Well, the architect very deliberately designed a whole bunch of the floors to be as close to identical as possible so that when the construction crews were building one floor and finished, and then they went to the next floor they were doing the exact same thing again, and then they went to the next floor and again the next floor again, and guess what, as the building went up the construction crew got faster and faster and faster.

That’s modularity and if we think in those terms, the applications of that principle are practically unlimited. It just requires a little bit of understanding of the fundamental concept and a whole lot of human imagination.

Rachel Salaman: Yes, I can see how that would apply to all sorts of things once you, like you say, you just have to see things through that lens, don’t you?

Dan Gardner: Yes.

Rachel Salaman: At the end of the book, we’re reminded that us humans are the biggest risk to our projects. Human psychology causes all sorts of problems, as we’ve covered. What are some final tips to help us get out of our own way so that we can get our big projects done?

Dan Gardner: Well, I mean, the very first thing you need to do, everybody needs to do is buy Daniel Kahneman’s book and read it carefully and think about it very carefully. “Psychology 101” should be one of the, you know, it’s a basic tool, it’s the equivalent of a hammer in a toolbox for any executive today.

You should be psychologically astute and once you become psychologically astute you should start to develop self-awareness, self-criticism, and the best form of self-criticism isn’t actually that which you apply yourself. It’s actually your fellow team members, right?

And so if I’m on a team where we are open and constructive and we engage in constructive criticism, then I can benefit from your awareness of my own blind spots, for example. So, developing a team in which you have psychological safety, which is a term which means essentially that people feel safe to raise critical points, that’s really foundational of the success of any big project.

Rachel Salaman: Dan Gardner, thanks very much for joining us today.

Dan Gardner: Thank you.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Dan’s book again is “How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, From Home Renovations to Space Exploration” and it’s co-written with Bent Flyvbjerg.

If you’d like to find out more about Bent and his work, his first name is spelt Bent, his last name is Flyvbjerg, and you can find out more about Dan at dangardner.ca and you can see a lot of his work there. I’ll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.