Bent Flyvbjerg > Quotes

“We’re good at learning by tinkering—which is fortunate, because we’re terrible at getting things right the first time.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“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.[29] That’s exactly the right approach for big projects: Put enormous care and effort into planning to ensure that delivery is smooth and swift. Think slow, act fast: That’s the secret of success.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“YOU WANT THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT, NOT THE PILOT, TO BE AN OPTIMIST”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“Also, the technologically high-risk Apollo aerospace programme is considered a classic success story of megaproject planning and implementation. The cost overrun on this US$21 billion project was only 5 per cent. Few know, however, that the original budget estimate included US$8 billion of contingencies.18 By allowing for risk with foresight, the programme avoided ending up in the type of large cost overrun that destabilises many major projects during implementation. The Apollo approach, with its realistic view of risks, costs and contingencies, should be adopted in more major projects.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition

“Small is good. For one thing, small projects can be simple.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“Communicative and deliberative approaches work well as ideals and evaluative yardsticks for decision making, but they are quite defenceless in the face of power.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition

“Infrastructure is the great space shrinker, and power, wealth and status increasingly belong to those who know how to shrink space, or know how to benefit from space being shrunk.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition

“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.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“Wealth, for example, is fat-tailed. At the time of writing, the wealthiest person in the world is 3,134,707 times wealthier than the average person. If human height followed the same distribution as human wealth, the tallest person in the world would not be 1.6 times taller than the average person; he would be 3,311 miles (5,329 kilometers) tall, meaning that his head would be thirteen times farther into outer space than the International Space Station.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration

“Megaproject development today is not a field of what has been called ‘honest numbers’.14 It is a field where you will see one group of professionals calling the work of another not only ‘biased’ and ‘seriously flawed’ but a ‘grave embarrassment’ to the profession.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition

“For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost. For want of a rider, the battle was lost. For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“We have documented in this book that: • Cost overruns of 50 per cent to 100 per cent in real terms are common in megaprojects; overruns above 100 per cent are not uncommon; • Demand forecasts that are wrong by 20 per cent to 70 per cent compared with actual developments are common; • The extent and magnitude of actual environmental impacts of projects are often very different from forecast impacts. Post-auditing is neglected;”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition

“strong incentives and weak disincentives for cost underestimation and thus for cost overrun may have taught project promoters what there is to learn, namely that cost underestimation and overrun pay off. If this is the case, cost overrun must be expected and it must be expected to be intentional.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition

“But the cost of that haste was terrible, and not only in terms of cost overruns. Larsen was so appalled by the completed building that he wrote a whole book to clear his reputation and explain the confused structure, which he called a “mausoleum.” Haste makes waste.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“Cost underestimation and overrun have not decreased over the past seventy years. No learning seems to take place; • Cost underestimation and overrun cannot be explained by error and seem to be best explained by strategic misrepresentation, namely lying, with a view to getting projects started.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition

“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.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“Again, the more time that passes from decision to delivery, the greater the probability of one or more of these events happening. It’s even possible that trivial events, in just the wrong circumstances, can have devastating consequences.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“Uncertainty in estimating viability is related in this way not only to the innate difficulty of predicting the future but also to power and interests.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition

“Projects are not goals in themselves. Projects are how goals are achieved. People don’t build skyscrapers,”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“On project after project, rushed, superficial planning is followed by a quick start that makes everybody happy because shovels are in the ground. But inevitably, the project crashes into problems that were overlooked or not seriously analyzed and dealt with in planning. People run around trying to fix things. More stuff breaks. There is more running around. I call this the “break-fix cycle.” A project that enters it is like a mammoth stuck in a tar pit.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“WATCH YOUR DOWNSIDE It’s often said that opportunity is as important as risk. That’s false. Risk can kill you or your project. No upside can compensate for that. For fat-tailed risk, which is present in most projects, forget about forecasting risk; go directly to mitigation by spotting and eliminating dangers.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“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. In fact, the best-performing project types in my entire database, by a comfortable margin, are wind and solar power.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“By carefully working through what must be done to get to their goal, the logic that surfaced midconstruction and convinced David and Deborah to make piecemeal expansions of the project will instead surface up front in a conversation about what other renovations they might consider. And if major work is under way and they would have to move out anyway, would it not make sense to also consider other work they might want to do in the future? To get it all over with at once. Plus it’s cheaper to have workers come on-site once and do many jobs rather than come back multiple times.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration

“In total, only 8.5 percent of projects hit the mark on both cost and time. And a minuscule”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“A bad plan is one that applies neither experimentation nor experience.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“There’s a word to describe a group of people who feel that way: they are a team.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“Think of your project as “one of those,” gather data, and learn from all the experience those numbers represent by making reference-class forecasts. Use the same focus to spot and mitigate risks. Switching the focus from your project to the class your project belongs to will lead, paradoxically, to a more accurate understanding of your project.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“Finally, don’t forget black swans. All projects are vulnerable to unpredictable shocks, with their vulnerability growing as time passes. So the fact that the delivery of your one huge thing will take a very long time means that it is at high risk of being walloped by something you cannot possibly anticipate.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“MAKE FRIENDS AND KEEP THEM FRIENDLY”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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

“See your project as one in a class of similar projects already done, as “one of those.” Use data from that class—about cost, time, benefits, or whatever else you want to forecast—as your anchor. Then adjust up or down, if necessary, to reflect how your specific project differs from the mean in the class. That’s it.”
― Bent Flyvbjerg, 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