Como fazer grandes coisas

by Bent Flyvbjerg, Dan Gardner

“POR QUE GRANDES PROJETOS DÃO ERRADO COM TANTA FREQUÊNCIA? Bent Flyvbjerg é o especialista em ‘megaprojetos’ e Dan Gardner traz suas habilidades de contar histórias para Como fazer grandes coisas, com exemplos que vão desde um estúdio de Jimi Hendrix à Sydney Opera House.” – Financial Times (Melhores livros de 2023 até agora)
Nada é mais inspirador do que uma grande visão que se torna uma nova e triunfante realidade. Pense em como o Empire State Building passou de um esboço a uma joia no horizonte de Nova York em 21 meses, ou como o iPod da Apple passou de um projeto com um único funcionário a um lançamento de produto em onze meses.
São histórias maravilhosas. Mas na maioria das vezes as grandes visões se transformam em pesadelos. Quase todas as grandes cidades do mundo têm um fiasco do tipo no seu quintal. Na verdade, nada menos que 92% dos megaprojetos ultrapassam o orçamento ou o prazo, ou ambos. Até mesmo empreendimentos mais modestos – como lançar um pequeno
negócio, organizar uma conferência ou simplesmente terminar um trabalho no prazo – também costumam fracassar. Por quê?
Compreender o que distingue os triunfos dos fracassos tem sido o trabalho da vida do professor de Oxford Bent Flyvbjerg, conhecido como “o maior especialista mundial em megaprojetos”. Em Como fazer grandes coisas, ele identifica os erros de julgamento e de tomada de decisão que levam projetos, grandes e pequenos, ao fracasso, e os princípios baseados em pesquisas que farão com que você tenha sucesso com o seu.
Repleto de exemplos vívidos que vão desde a construção a Sydney Opera House à produção dos mais recentes sucessos de bilheteria da Pixar, até uma reforma residencial que deu errado, este livro revela como realizar qualquer projeto ambicioso – dentro do prazo e do orçamento.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Management, Leadership, Productivity, Economics, Psychology

373 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 7, 2023

About the author

Bent Flyvbjerg is a Danish economic geographer. He is the Villum Kann Rasmussen Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen.

His research focuses on management of megaprojects, including the Olympic Games, and cities.

He is the author or editor of 10 books and more than 200 papers in professional journals and edited volumes. His publications have been translated into 19 languages.

Research interests:
Decision Making, Risk, Project Management, Infrastructure, Cities

Reviews

[Daren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not my usual genre, but legitimately work related. This book does note that all the advice is scalable, so mega project, big project, small project...

This was pretty well presented, and obviously very data supported... in fact almost all data driven. While it was detailed, it was broken into sensible chapters, and built lesson onto lesson. There were loads of good example projects, and even if the reader failed to absorb any lesson, these were very interesting to read about.

The Sydney Opera House - a world renowned building, but it destroyed the career of its architect Jorn Utzon, who was fired from the project partway through construction - planned to take 5 years to build, it took 14 years, and came in 1400% over budget. Utzon was the scapegoat, Joe Cahill was the NSW Premier, and he wanted a legacy project in place for his retirement. He demanded construction began on time, despite the building design not being complete - they barely had an idea how to build it. They needed to dynamite sections and clear them away to start again! This one provides a series of good lessons, especially since it is world renowned and ultimately turned it failure into a success.

Not all the examples in this book are buildings (but they are the ones that interest me). Pixar Animation Studios are held up as a example of planning - a key lesson - plan your project as well as as extensively as you can. Solve as many of your problems as you can in advance of beginning. Because once you have started, that is when delays and problems cost the big money.

Not all the projects are doom and gloom stories - there are examples of success stories - the Empire State Building, Gehry's Guggenheim, T5 Heathrow Airport are some.

I won't attempt to summarise the book, but it does end with eleven take away rules (he calls them heuristics) for better project leadership. These are (for my benefit, not yours - I have to give the book back!) noted below. FYI I paraphrased a few of these...

Hire a masterbuilder - experience counts big time. It is worth paying up for expertise.
Get your team right - "Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better." Setting up a good, experienced team who will work together is a key.
Ask "why?" - asking why you are doing the project will focus you on what matters, your ultimate purpose and your result. Make sure you don't mistake your outcome with your why...
Build with Lego - this just means modular. Break your big thing into little things, that are preferably the same. Very applicable to solar, server farms, satellites etc and many building projects - schools, hospitals, etc where repetition occurs.
Think slow, act fast - time spent in planning, testing and preparing is significantly cheaper than time spent pausing construction to find answers. Prepare well then build quickly. The longer you build for, the more time for something to go wrong!
Take the outside view - your project is special, but very very rarely is it unique. Learn from the experiences of other similar projects - data is based on project class references.
Watch your downside - risk can kill your project, no upside can compensate this. Focus on not losing, every day, while keeping an eye on the prize - your goal.
Say no and walk away - at the outset, will the project have the people and funds necessary to succeed? If not, walk away.
Make friends and keep them friendly - keep diplomatic relations at all times, especially the good times - its risk management. If something goes wrong, it's too late to start developing bridges then!
Build climate mitigation into your project - no task is more urgent than mitigating the climate crisis. For greater good, and the good of your project.
Know that your biggest risk is you - self explanatory really. Projects fail because of leadership not taking on board the rules above.

I haven't read more of these types of management books to be able to compare, but this one had a good focus, and almost all the content was relevant to me. If for nothing else, the project stories are great.

4 stars.

[Kevin Hanks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whoa. That was incredible. Easy to understand, backed by data. Oh the data, how I loved it!! This was a book telling stories backed by data (this database of large projects he’s created is just awesome), instead of so many other books in this topic that tell a story and try to somehow make the data fit the story. It was refreshing and immediately beneficial to me.

I was in a meeting just this morning (no joke) where a project cost had come back much higher than the project estimate and people were trying to place blame on me (engineer in charge of design). I was able to calmly ask about the estimate and how those numbers were achieved. It became obvious very quickly that the estimate was just bad, and based on some poor assumptions and extremely optimistic projections. The conclusion of the meeting was a VP stating “guys, we need to get better at estimating.”

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

An approachable read highlighting the necessary factors of successful projects that come in on time and under budget. The book changed my perspective on the best ways to make decisions in both my personal and professional life.

[Pete · Rating 5 out of 5]

How Big Things Get Done (2023) by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner is about Flyvbjerg’s area of expertise, that of large projects and their success rates.

The book starts by describing how the record of big projects is worse than people think. Flyvbjerg has built up a database of 16,000 projects that details how projects typically end up. The incredible result is :

“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.”

The book then goes on to say that the ideal way to proceed is to think slow then act fast but that the opposite is usually the way things are done.

Flyvbjerg goes on to describe Amazon’s ‘working backward’ approach for building things. This involves starting by writing what the end goal is in a two page description that gives the value of what is being produced. Also a marketing brochure is written. Nicely the Fire Phone failure is also included.

Pixar and Frank Gehry are then held up as examples of iterative careful project planning. Gehry’s failure on the Disney Auditorium early in his career is contrasted against his success with the Guggenheim Bilbao. Pixar iterate over their films by rewriting the script repeatedly and then drawing storyboards and then going over with them repeatedly. The book was presumably written before Pixar’s Going Red came out. According to wikipedia that film is now ‘The film is ranked first on the list of “Biggest Money Losers, Based on Absolute Loss on Worldwide Earnings” by film industry data website The Numbers’.

The book then turns to what can make a project succeed. The value of experience in having done similar projects is highlighted by looking at construction projects where local firms are used instead of those who have real experience. Flyvbjerg addresses how people tend to see their projects as unique.

There is an excellent section on using the cost of similar projects to get a base rate cost and also to see what proportion of similar projects go over budget by and how much they go over budget by.

The idea that projects are better left unplanned is unpicked carefully and well.

The huge value of good teams for projects is then described and the example of Heathrow’s Terminal Five construction is used to show how good teams can work.

Then the value of building large projects from modular components is highlighted by looking at modular construction and how solar panel projects are accurately costed.

Flyvbjerg writes how solar and wind are better for producing low carbon dioxide emitting power because solar and wind projects are modular and thus there is learning on how to get them done more cheaply. He compares this to nuclear power that often has cost overruns. Unfortunately the learning effects of building a lot of nuclear, as was done in France and by South Korea is not also included. Nor does Flyvbjerg use the ‘working backward’ approach when looking at what solar and wind are for, namely in reducing emissions. He doesn’t look at how France and Sweden using nuclear power have lower C02 produced per unit of electricity and cheaper electricity than Denmark and Germany that have used lots of solar and wind. Building solar and wind may be cheap by capacity, but by value provided to the grid the results have been disappointing.

Finally the book sums up the lessons from the book and the value that would be obtained if big projects were run better.

How Big Things Get Done is an excellent book that will hopefully get wide readership. Hopefully politicians will read the book before proposing their next grand projects and we in the public will read it so that we can better assess political promises.

[Cyrus Samii · Rating 3 out of 5]

Based on practical experience and empirical analysis, Flyvberg offers a model for seeing through the delivery of mega projects. The catch phrase is “think slow act fast.” The elements include the following.

“Right to left planning”: have clarity on the big picture goal and plan through backward induction.

“Pixar planning”: use low stakes pilot tests and high resolution models to get all the details right.

“Reference class forecasting”: forecast costs using actual ex post data on similar projects rather than just projecting costs based on ex ante assumptions.

“Risk/black swan management”: find ways to limit extent to which risks can undermine delivery, eg by shortening the delivery timeline, having risk mitigation personnel lined up in advance (eg, the example of having archaeologists on retainer for any tunneling project), and making the project modular. Modularity is important to Flyvberh and has two aspect to this. First is that the project can be broken down into small functioning pieces, then benefits starts to accrue even if partially completed. Second, modularity allows for making the project a set of repeatable tasks for which you can get learning and scalability of production.

Aside from these practical tips, the book offers some theoretical reflection. By Flyberg’s analysis, budgets and timelines can be too optimistic either for reasons of cognitive bias or strategic misrepresentation, where the latter serves the purpose of gaining project approval under false pretenses. It’s useful to consider both of these possible explanations for when projects come out over budget and delayed.

I had some quibbles here and there on details. Eg, in discussing risk management the analysis suggests that the probability of any one of a set of independent events occurring is the sum of probabilities for each event, but this is of course incorrect.

Reference class forecasting refers to doing costing based on ex post data rather than only ex ante assumptions. The call for actual data collection is certainly laudable.

Overall a book conveying practical tips on large project delivery from an author with a lot of relevant expertise. Not paradigm shifting content but helpful.

[Madison Brownley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn’t love reading this book (not a lover of non-fiction) but there were some really good insights and learnings for delivering mega-projects successfully.
Key takeaways:
1. Plan slowly and deliver quickly. We have a bias for action that we should resist.
2. Projects often go over-budget and over-run - this is more often because of oversights in the planning, not the delivery
3. Don’t make bottom up cost and schedule estimates, use benchmarks that account for materialisation of risks
4. Break projects down into modular chunks
5. Use experienced people and processes

[Jurgen Appelo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant book with inspiring stories that takes traditional project management into the realm of modern, agile management.

[Dave Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must read for anyone who works on or is interested in large-scale projects. Flyvbjerg reversed my strong-held belief in moving quickly in order to “fail fast.” His nuanced explanation of thinking slow and acting fast is a personal game changer in managing schedule, cost, and risk. He covers tons of other key principles on how to effectively deliver large projects.

[Peter Tillman]

WSJ's positive review:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-big-...
(Paywalled. As always, I'm happy to email a copy to non-subscribers)
Excerpt:
"Mr. Flyvbjerg identifies two common flaws in developing large-scale projects: inadequate planning and prolonged execution. Managers and politicians have a bias for action, he says, often treating planning as an annoyance that must be endured before the real work begins. Imposing tight deadlines for completion may end up adding costs and time, because the easiest way to craft a tighter schedule is to short-circuit the planning process. Rushed planning can result in problems that crop up later, generating delays that push up the cost.

Thorough planning, in Mr. Flyvbjerg’s view, should be followed by quick execution: The biggest source of risk, he says, is low-probability events—black swans—that occur after the start of construction or implementation. This is the time when a pandemic, a burst of inflation, a labor dispute or a natural disaster can delay even the best plans and upend cost estimates. The way to mitigate the risk, he says, is to “think slow, act fast,” investigating the project carefully on the front end but then, following the decision to proceed, moving full speed ahead."

[Mindaugas Mozūras · Rating 4 out of 5]

If a project can be delivered in a modular manner, enabling learning along the way, it is likely to succeed.

- Think from left to right
- Think slow, act fast
- Maximize experience and experimentation
- Reduce the window of doom
- Your project isn't as unique as you think
- Use the right anchors for estimates (reference class forecasting)
- Big is best built from small

[Eduardo Montiel · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Think slow, act fast.” In this must-read book on project management, Flyvberg applies this golden rule of project management to various cases in different industries. Other useful planning tools include reference-class forecasting, risk & black swan management, the importance of experience (experiri), Pixar planning, and thinking from right to left. These are the essential tools for thinking slow in planning before acting fast in delivery. (the basic idea is the same everywhere: Think first, then implement. First, planning. Second, delivery.)

This book is a near perfect non-fiction book and a model of how they should be written: the concepts are well-organized and presented, the cases he uses as evidence are adequate and easy to understand, the chapters are short, well-written and superbly-edited… And most importantly, it’s a short read at around 250+ pages and includes a well-written conclusion on heuristics that ties the main concepts together. Furthermore, the Danish Flyvberg is the unquestioned world leader in project management data and analysis:

The database that started with 258 projects now contains more than 16,000 projects from 20-plus different fields in 136 countries on all continents except Antarctica, and it continues to grow.

Notes:
- “Think slow, act fast.”
- fat tailed distribution of megaprojects. They include nuclear power plants, hydroelectric dams, information technology, tunnels, major buildings, aerospace, and many more. In fact, almost all the project types in my database are fat-tailed.
-Pixar Planning: any planning that develops a tested and tried plan; that is, a plan worthy of its name.
-commitment fallacy: “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
- strategic misrepresentation: the tendency to deliberately and systematically distort or misstate information for strategic purposes.
- “Hofstadter’s Law” : “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”
- Projects are not goals in themselves. Projects are how goals are achieved. (box on the right logic:
With the goal always in view, there is no getting lost. That’s thinking from right to left. )
- 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.
- Third, an iterative process such as Pixar’s corrects for a basic cognitive bias that psychologists call the “illusion of explanatory depth.”
- When a minimum viable product approach isn’t possible, try a “maximum virtual product” —a hyperrealistic, exquisitely detailed model like those that Frank Gehry made for the Guggenheim Bilbao and all his buildings since and those that Pixar makes for each of its feature films before shooting.
- Better to be—like Apple following Blackberry into smartphones—a “fast follower” and learn from the first mover.
- If decision makers valued experience properly, they would be wary of a technology that is new, because it is inexperienced technology. (Olympics example)
- tacit vs explicit knowledge : explicit knowledge can be formally documented and shared, tacit knowledge exists inside the heads of your employees.
- Hire experienced people (with experience in PM). Rely on the reliable. Don’t gamble if you can avoid it. Don’t be the first. Remove the words custom and bespoke from your vocabulary.
- In psychology, the process Caro used to create his forecast is known as “anchoring and adjustment.”
Use a good anchor, and you greatly improve your chance of making a good forecast; use a bad anchor, get a bad forecast.
- reference class forecasting RCF: Kahneman and Tversky dubbed these two perspectives the “inside view” (looking at the individual project in its singularity) and the “outside view” (looking at a project as part of a class of projects, as “one of those”).
- black swan management: cut the tail of a big, complex project.
- T5 terminal project : gold standard in mega projects and incentives. (one team mentality, With a shared sense of identity, purpose, and standards, open communication is easier, but BAA further cultivated the feeling that everyone on the project had both a right and a responsibility to speak up.
- There are five project types that are not fat-tailed. 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.
- Modularity delivers faster, cheaper, and better, making it valuable for all project types and sizes. But for building at a truly huge scale—the scale that transforms cities, countries, even the world—modularity is not just valuable, it’s indispensable.
- 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.
- Only proven technologies—those with a high degree of “frozen experience” —were used.
- The following are eleven of my favorite heuristics, developed during decades of studying and managing big projects. (great summary of heuristics at end of book)

5/5. June 2024 (a must-read for project managers).

Highlights

Understanding what distinguishes the triumphs from the failures has been the life’s work of Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg, dubbed “the world’s leading megaproject expert.” In this book , he identifies the errors in judgment and decision-making that lead projects, both big and small, to fail, and the research-based principles that will make you succeed with yours:

I call the pattern followed by the Empire State Building and other successful projects “Think slow, act fast.”

The pattern was so clear that I started calling it the “Iron Law of Megaprojects”: over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over again.

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.

So the critical question is this: Are project outcomes distributed “normally,” or do they have fat tails? My database revealed that information technology projects have fat tails.

Haste makes not only waste but tragedy. The mighty Caesar Augustus, whose personal motto was “Festina lente,” or “Make haste slowly.”

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, it’s “development and production”; in architecture, “design and construction”—but the basic idea is the same everywhere: Think first, then implement.

Not only is it safer for planning to be slow, it is good for planning to be slow, as the directors at Pixar well know. After all, cultivating ideas and innovations takes time. Spotting the implications of different options and approaches takes more time. Puzzling through complex problems, coming up with solutions, and putting them to the test take still more time. Planning requires thinking—and creative, critical, careful thinking is slow.

“Act in haste, repent at leisure” is a centuries-old chestnut.

Caro constantly looks at his summary and compares it with what he is currently writing. “Is this fitting in with those three paragraphs?,” he asks himself. “How is it fitting in? What you wrote is good, but it’s not fitting in. So you have to throw it away or find a way to make it fit in.”

What sets good planning apart from the rest is something completely different. It is captured by a Latin verb, experiri. Experiri means “to try,” “to test,” or “to prove.” It is the origin of two wonderful words in English: experiment and experience.

As the old Latin saying goes, “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.

Aristotle said that experience is “the fruit of years” and argued that it is the source of what he called “phronesis”—the “practical wisdom” that allows us to see what is good for people and to make it happen, which Aristotle saw as the highest “intellectual virtue.”[1] Modern science suggests that he was quite right.

“uniqueness bias,” which means they tend to see their projects as unique, one-off ventures that have little or nothing to learn from earlier projects.[5] And so they commonly don’t.

shift your mindset from forecasting a single outcome (“The project will cost X”) to forecasting risk (“The project is X percent likely to cost more than Y”), using the full range of the distribution. In a typical fat-tailed distribution in project management, about 80 percent of the outcomes will make up the body of the distribution.

If we consider only stories, survivorship bias will always favor Hirschman’s account because projects that overcome adversity with a burst of creativity and deliver great triumphs are like dropouts who become billionaires; they’re great stories, so they get noticed.

Its name was Monju, meaning “wisdom.”

“negative learning”: The more you learn, the more difficult and costly it gets.

Repetition is the genius of modularity; it enables experimentation. If something works, you keep it in the plan. If it doesn’t, you “fail fast,”

To put them in perspective, a 2020 study funded by the German government estimated that the total cost to end global hunger by 2030 would be $330 billion over ten years —a fraction of what could be gained by doing big projects a little better.

Over the same ten years, the percentage of Denmark’s electricity generated by fossil fuels fell from 72 percent to 24 percent, while the share contributed by wind power soared from 18 percent to 56 percent.

Heuristics are fast and frugal rules of thumb used to simplify complex decisions. The word has its origin in the ancient Greek word Eureka!, the cry of joy and satisfaction when one finds or discovers something.

The greatest threat Lasko faced wasn’t out in the world; it was in his own head, in his behavioral biases. This is true for every one of us and every project. Which is why your biggest risk is you.

[Mikhail Kalashnikov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Главный специалист в мире по сверхбольшим проектам рассказывает, чем успешные проекты отличаются от провальных. Познавательно и довольно убедительно.

Если сократить до трех тезисов, получится так:
1) самая важная фаза проектов — планирование и моделирование, чем оно интенсивнее и подробнее, тем лучше (например, у Pixar есть много итераций и прототипов до того, как начнут снимать реальный фильм);
2) лучший способ оценивать сроки и стоимость проектов — сравнивать их с другими похожими проектами (а если вам кажется, что таких нет, то вы, во-первых, себя обманываете, а во-вторых, ваш проект заранее обречен на большие проблемы);
3) лучший способ делать большие проекты — нанять людей с большим опытом подобных проектов, собственной командой исполнителей и хорошо все заранее спланировать.

Там еще есть несколько идей, но лучше тогда уже прочитать.

Цитаты:

«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. Doing what you said you would do should be routine, or at least common. But it almost never happens.»

«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.”

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.”»

«When people are asked to make a “best-guess” scenario—the scenario most likely to occur—what they come up with is generally indistinguishable from what they settle on when asked for a “best-case” scenario.»

«NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which is now almost a million miles from Earth, was forecast to take twelve years but required to complete, while its final cost of $8.8 billion was an astronomical—forgive me—450 percent over budget.»

«When a highly experienced project leader uses a highly iterative planning process—what I earlier called “Pixar planning”—good things happen. When writing scripts or dreaming up images, Pete Docter said, “I just dive in and do stuff completely intuitively. I’m going to be more accurate. I’m funnier. More truthful.” But Docter then puts his intuitive judgments to the test by turning his scripts and images into a video mock-up and seeing how an audience responds.»

«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.”»

«But the first-mover advantage is greatly overstated. In a watershed study, researchers compared the fates of “pioneer” companies that had been to exploit a market and “settlers” that had followed the pioneers into the market. Drawing on data from five hundred brands in fifty product categories, they found that almost half of pioneers failed, compared to 8 percent of settlers. The surviving pioneers took 10 percent of their market, on average, compared to 28 percent for settlers.»

«The word deadline comes from the American Civil War, when prison camps set boundaries and any prisoner who crossed a line was shot. For BAA, the metaphor fit uncomfortably well.»

[Adrian Koch Berg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Først og fremst: klarer kunststykket å støtte seg på statistikk og data men samtidig være lettlest. Helt tydelig at mannen har kunnskap i bøtter og spann om megaprosjekter, der står han fjellstøtt. Mye bra lærdom å ta med seg, spesielt i viktigheten av et godt forarbeid (think slow, then act fast).

Har et parti i boka hvor han trekker frem et privat oppussingsprosjekt for å vise at dette er universelle prinsipper som gjelder for alle typer prosjekter. Får litt følelsen av at det er klemt inn for å gi den jevne leser noe å relatere til, men la gå.

Siste kapittel er dedikert til klima, og her er jeg litt usikker på om det hører hjemme i boka. Var i utgangspunktet villig til å la det passere fordi det er et viktig tema, men forfatteren går litt vel langt i å snakke opp vind og vannkraft, samtidig som kjernekraft stemples som for dyrt. Synes det får litt preg av forfatters personlige mening fremfor å støtte seg på tall og erfaringer, og hele kapittelet føles litt malplassert.

[Krishna Sunder · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think the world is significantly better off for this book having been written. Flyvberg conducts a pretty comprehensive review of thousands of construction megaprojects across different sectors and distills them into a handful of practical insights.

The bulk of this research boils down to pretty common sense recommendations — “think slow, act fast”; prioritize experimentation and experience; avoid cognitive biases, etc. — but this is basically Flyvberg’s whole argument. Success hinges on developing what he (and Aristotle, allegedly) call phronesis, or ‘practical wisdom’.

On the whole I found it very compelling. Unfortunately, nuclear reactors and waste storage were the absolute worst-performing projects in his entire database… :( Flyvberg calls them out constantly and walks through how reactor construction actually lacks many of the key elements that typically lead to positive learning. So that’s great.

I think Flyvberg overestimates the power of modularity to an extent (his solution to the nuclear problem is basically waving his hands and saying ‘SMRs’), but this book still offers a really powerful framework to understand why some projects go well while others go catastrophically wrong. I’d give it a 4.5, rounded up.

[Pedro Loos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Livro sensacional e extremamente embasado com dados. De agora em diante faz parte da minha lista de leituras essenciais!

[Matas Maldeikis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tiems, kurie dirba su dideliais projektais. Nuo rūmų iki fabrikų statymo, 99.5 jų nepabaigiami laiku nei pagal biudžetą. Nieko rimto, bet žmonėms iš šių sričių vertingas skaitinys.

[Piotr Dabrowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading for professionals involved in large projects. This book challenges deeply ingrained ideas in construction, project management, and engineering, and is particularly insightful on why cost overruns occur. It makes one rethink how projects are conceived, planned, and delivered.

[August Hernø · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sikkert rigtig god hvis man skal bygge en bro eller opera eller sådan noget. Men ikke så relevant for mig dsv

[Domenico Pirrotta · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's an eye-opening and practical book. Flyvbjerg and Gardner use fascinating examples to explore what makes ambitious projects successful and sustainable. I especially loved the focus on realistic planning, the concept of "think slow, act fast", and the use of data to avoid common pitfalls. It’s a compelling, insightful, and highly applicable read—not just for project managers but for anyone tackling big challenges. Highly recommend!

[Kelly Almon · Rating 5 out of 5]

if The Title Grabs You

This book delivers a fantastic insight into building mega projects. It is must reading for any local government official who’s jurisdiction is planning any sizable project, like mine, a new county courthouse.

[Jonny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Started reading this a couple of months ago and finally finished it…

Flyvbjerg has a huge reputation in the field, and I was looking forward to finding more about the years of empirical research that has gone into his study of mega projects. You get bits of it (in the chapter on modular projects and the extent to which they reduce tail risk), but the best visualised example is in the appendix which shows how cost overruns fall across different project types and where extreme tail risk lies.

The fact that those examples are buried basically proves his core point - it’s a lot more lucrative and easier to selectively tell stories, rather than do real empirical analysis. He even does this himself, comparing development of the Sydney Opera House to, predictably, Pixar!

Overall there’s enough real insight in here to make it a four star book, but it’s a bit of an indictment about how even people who read books like this engage with evidence that he clearly concluded he needed to make it more of a middle-era Niall Ferguson book than a serious piece of analysis.

[Alison · Rating 2 out of 5]

Don’t rush into things, make a well execute plan, and your kitchen renovation will go over budget.

That’s the entire book - none of which felt surprising?
I gave it an extra star because it wasn’t painful to read, just kind of pointless. There is also only 190ish pages of content - the rest is notes, appendixes and the author telling the reader to read more of his books. I’m glad it wasn’t longer, but I feel like I got ripped off.

A lot of thoughts on this book… few are positive.

[Neven · Rating 3 out of 5]

I admit that I was expecting more of a history or a case study, whereas the book is a lightweight, airport-bookstore management guide. As such, it’s correct and helpful when it talks in truisms (“assemble an expert team,” “plan before starting”) and what little specifics it contains tends to be conflicting and unclear.

For instance, while I’m sure the author’s impressive database of large projects is thorough, I wonder if it considers projects that simply never start due to a protracted and unproductive planning phase? Or projects that fail to get broad support due to public attitudes? In my experience, these are very common, and fighting those battles is just as important.

P.S. And one funny detail: in sections regarding modularity in projects, wedding cakes are used as a guiding metaphor. The books says that in essence, a wedding cake is large and impressive, but it’s really just a bunch of cakes staked on top of each other. Learn how to bake one cake, and then all you do is stack them. I can’t stress how misguided this advice is—both of cakes, and of other projects. Architectural bakes require an understanding of structural tricks such as rods and supporting separators. Weight and symmetry become extremely important. This is the exact failure point for beginner bakers attempting a 3-tier cake; not the “baking cakes” part. And in the end, you don’t get “a pile of cakes,” you get something that looks like one large cake, but should not be cut as such. Other projects, similarly, may have modular components, but the integration of those is a crucial challenge, and it’s where things often fall apart.

[Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading about concepts I’ve heard of before in contexts unfamiliar to me. There’s a lot in here about testing and planning that designers will recognize as prototyping. There’s also a number of themes that will be familiar to those who’ve read Kahnenman (I haven’t but he cites a lot of his work and their collaborations). It ends talking about Lego blocks, which is reminiscent of the “assemblies” that the Santa Fe Institute has been discussing on their podcast wrt evolutionary building blocks.

It’s great to read books that are informed by theory and research, but lived through the author’s experience. That is a rare intersection. Typically you get b.s. from practitioners spouting about the one way they’ve done something and extrapolating it for every use case. Or you get highly theoretical books from academics that aren’t field tested. Here, you get both, in a well-written book that will provide you with at least one big concept you’ll want to start using. Guaranteed.

I didn’t give five stars only because I thought the book fell off a bit in the final chapter as it got highly specific around climate change projects. Interesting for sure, but didn’t bolster the book in my opinion.

[Caimin Ayres · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.55
Good points were made on planning. However there was nothing ground breaking and Kahnemans work on biases was referenced quite a bit which I had already read about. It's written in the same format as most pop science books of point example reinforcement. Although effective hard to adjudicte a higher rating for originality. That being said its a short read and straight to the point which I can admire and did also pose some ideas I hadn't pondered before.
Here are some of the main ideas:
- Have a leader with experience. (Project manager, lead builder)
- Get your team right.
- Understand the purpose of the project. (Maybe you're building the wrong thing or don't need to build it at all)
- Build things that are modular and scalable.
- Think slow act fast.
- Take the outside view. (have other similar projects as reference points for cost and use as an anchor)
- Watch your downside.
- Keep trying many different things to get the perfect plan.

[Elishka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed this! Some of the takeaways are perhaps a little obvious, but it’s full of interesting stories and data points which really bring them to life. Resolved some tensions within the idea of “agile planning” (at what point does that just become waterfall?) that I’ve been wrestling with for some time. Also includes a nice focus on the climate crisis and the need to get big infrastructure projects done right first time if we are to get to net zero. Would recommend for anyone working in a project space whether that’s IT, infrastructure or just a good old home renovation!

[Pritish Patil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very insighful! I probably will read it a couple more times.

[Annie Garry · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting overview of major project delivery (inc. benefits, risk, organisational culture, climate litigation) and useful to be applied to wide range of case studies/different sectors. It was fairly high-level but a useful reinforcement of ideas

[Alli Giorgi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Prob gonna start avoiding books written by men after this one

[Adeline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read where 1. stick to common sense (and beware of politics and cognitive biases) + 2. data driven "fat tail" discussion