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Gorilla in the Cockpit: Breaking the Hidden Patterns of Project Failure and the System for Success
Whether you lead a company, a project or your life, Gorilla in the Cockpit is a smart investment.
—Scott A. Snook, Professor, Harvard Business School
Open the Megaproject Black Box and Avoid Billion-Dollar Disasters
Despite decades of analysis, thousands of reports, myriad methodologies, and countless experts, major and megaprojects (those over $1 billion) and change initiatives keep failing, Why?
Gorilla in the Cockpit offers a revolutionary way to understand megaproject failures. It opens the Black Box to reveal the hidden drivers of project crashes. The root causes cannot be found in traditional project management books. They are neither technical nor financial. They are human.
Highly valuable for our executive board and 150 direct reports in transforming the mindset, communication, and strategic outlook in a way that led to real-world results.
—Wolfgang Pitz, CEO, SpaceTech; ex-Space Program Manager, Airbus Defense & Space
Gorilla in the Cockpit doesn't stop at diagnostics and explanations. It offers a solution based on the latest discoveries in neuroscience, psycholinguistics, and behavioral economics, with practical application to real-life projects. Its systematic framework encompasses all steps of leading and managing megaprojects, from design to procurement, stakeholder management to execution, and handover to sustainability.
Learn how
Challenge how you see, approach, and lead megaprojects—and massive change programs in your organizations.Expose the hidden human patterns that destroy billions (and trillions) of shareholder value and taxpayer money each year.Show a revolutionary way of understanding what happens in the project Black Box and why this drives 65% failure rates.Explode the myth that major project failure is inevitable.De-Risk your project flight path and boost your project success rate.
Gorilla in the Cockpit is a rare look behind the scenes of megaprojects by two seasoned experts. If you want to understand what really goes on in big projects, why they fail so often and what it takes for them to succeed, this book is a must-read.
—Bent Flyvbjerg, professor at Oxford and Copenhagen, principal author of How Big Things Get Done and Megaprojects and Risk.
—Scott A. Snook, Professor, Harvard Business School
Open the Megaproject Black Box and Avoid Billion-Dollar Disasters
Despite decades of analysis, thousands of reports, myriad methodologies, and countless experts, major and megaprojects (those over $1 billion) and change initiatives keep failing, Why?
Gorilla in the Cockpit offers a revolutionary way to understand megaproject failures. It opens the Black Box to reveal the hidden drivers of project crashes. The root causes cannot be found in traditional project management books. They are neither technical nor financial. They are human.
Highly valuable for our executive board and 150 direct reports in transforming the mindset, communication, and strategic outlook in a way that led to real-world results.
—Wolfgang Pitz, CEO, SpaceTech; ex-Space Program Manager, Airbus Defense & Space
Gorilla in the Cockpit doesn't stop at diagnostics and explanations. It offers a solution based on the latest discoveries in neuroscience, psycholinguistics, and behavioral economics, with practical application to real-life projects. Its systematic framework encompasses all steps of leading and managing megaprojects, from design to procurement, stakeholder management to execution, and handover to sustainability.
Learn how
Challenge how you see, approach, and lead megaprojects—and massive change programs in your organizations.Expose the hidden human patterns that destroy billions (and trillions) of shareholder value and taxpayer money each year.Show a revolutionary way of understanding what happens in the project Black Box and why this drives 65% failure rates.Explode the myth that major project failure is inevitable.De-Risk your project flight path and boost your project success rate.
Gorilla in the Cockpit is a rare look behind the scenes of megaprojects by two seasoned experts. If you want to understand what really goes on in big projects, why they fail so often and what it takes for them to succeed, this book is a must-read.
—Bent Flyvbjerg, professor at Oxford and Copenhagen, principal author of How Big Things Get Done and Megaprojects and Risk.
261 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 3, 2022
33 people are currently reading
42 people want to read
About the author
Thomas D. Zweifel
28 books4 followersIt was a perfectly clear day in September 2001, an Indian-summer morning when the sky was deep blue. Thomas was sitting on the Brooklyn Promenade--alone except for a few runners and dog walkers--and reading Michel Houellebecq's Les Particules Élémentaires (this is not an endorsement of that book) when he looked up at 8:46 a.m. and saw something he had never seen before: A plane hit the World Trade Center. Smoke and millions of tiny metallic glitters were in the air; a light wind swept them toward him. The glitters turned out to be countless papers, documents flying across the East River. One of them was a page from a civil law book, blackened on all four sides. Another was a FedEx envelope with a contract that someone had just signed a few minutes earlier.
That moment changed Thomas' world, and his life, forever. He set out on a journey to himself. And he started to worry about what kind of legacy to leave. One answer: to write books that help leaders of all stripes build successful companies and/or lives.
Dr. Thomas D. Zweifel is is a board member, strategy and performance expert, TED speaker and award-winning author of 11 books, including "Strategy-In-Action" (with Edward J. Borey), "Communicate or Die," "The Rabbi and the CEO" (with Aaron L. Raskin) and "Gorilla in the Cockpit" (with Vip Vyas).
Since 1984, living in Europe, India, Japan, and the United States, Thomas has helped clients align on strategy, boost leadership, and build high-performance teams in the action of meeting strategic and/or breakthrough objectives.
From 1997 to 2011, Thomas was the CEO of Swiss Consulting Group, named a "Fast Company" by Fast Company magazine and awarded "Best of Business in New York for Management Consulting" by SBCA.
Strategies based on his books are used by 30+ Fortune 500 companies, the UN Development Programme, the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and the U.S. Air Force Academy, to help their teams meet strategic imperatives.
Since 2001, Thomas has taught leadership to 1,500+ students at Columbia University and St. Gallen University to prepare them for executive leadership positions.
He often appears in the media, including ABC News, Bloomberg TV, and CNN. A speaker for ten speaker bureaus, his interdisciplinary and action-packed keynotes inspire business leaders.
Born in Paris, Thomas was educated in Switzerland, Germany and the United States, and holds a Ph.D. in International Political Economy from New York University.
In 1996 he realized his dream of breaking three hours in the New York City Marathon, and in 1997 was recognized as "fastest CEO in the New York City Marathon." He lives in Zurich with his wife and their two daughters (and a dog called Motek, the only other man in the house).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_...
That moment changed Thomas' world, and his life, forever. He set out on a journey to himself. And he started to worry about what kind of legacy to leave. One answer: to write books that help leaders of all stripes build successful companies and/or lives.
Dr. Thomas D. Zweifel is is a board member, strategy and performance expert, TED speaker and award-winning author of 11 books, including "Strategy-In-Action" (with Edward J. Borey), "Communicate or Die," "The Rabbi and the CEO" (with Aaron L. Raskin) and "Gorilla in the Cockpit" (with Vip Vyas).
Since 1984, living in Europe, India, Japan, and the United States, Thomas has helped clients align on strategy, boost leadership, and build high-performance teams in the action of meeting strategic and/or breakthrough objectives.
From 1997 to 2011, Thomas was the CEO of Swiss Consulting Group, named a "Fast Company" by Fast Company magazine and awarded "Best of Business in New York for Management Consulting" by SBCA.
Strategies based on his books are used by 30+ Fortune 500 companies, the UN Development Programme, the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and the U.S. Air Force Academy, to help their teams meet strategic imperatives.
Since 2001, Thomas has taught leadership to 1,500+ students at Columbia University and St. Gallen University to prepare them for executive leadership positions.
He often appears in the media, including ABC News, Bloomberg TV, and CNN. A speaker for ten speaker bureaus, his interdisciplinary and action-packed keynotes inspire business leaders.
Born in Paris, Thomas was educated in Switzerland, Germany and the United States, and holds a Ph.D. in International Political Economy from New York University.
In 1996 he realized his dream of breaking three hours in the New York City Marathon, and in 1997 was recognized as "fastest CEO in the New York City Marathon." He lives in Zurich with his wife and their two daughters (and a dog called Motek, the only other man in the house).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_...
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 45 reviews
May 30, 2024
The first half of the book I found useful (even though there was barely anything new). I was hoping there are more tips and tricks as the authors are seasoned project managers from big company projects but it was general psychological information of variety of biases. I was hoping they will dig deeper into why projects fail. Their main idea is that projects are network of conversations and pretty much all is about the conversations. Megaprojects fail not for technical but for human reasons, ranging from mindset to ego to communication to politics and culture. They list some major human fallacies that systematically hamper all rational actors and how cognitive failures impact projects. There are 4 case studies in the book, where 2 have failed and 2 succeeded. The main takeaways for me are:
Megaprojects - to design and set a new project on the path to success, or turn around your existing project and steer it to success.
White box - visible factors of project performance. Black box - hidden performance factors.
You have to be aware of the contextual factors that can impact performance (these are factors we have no influence over).
Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.
Typical project crash factors:
1. Poorly defined project scope.
2. Inadequate risk management.
3. Failure to identify key assumptions.
4. Project managers, who lack experience and training.
5. No use of formal methods and strategies.
6. Lack of effective communication at all levels.
7. Key staff leaving the project and/ or the company.
8. Poor management of expectations.
9. Ineffective leadership.
10. Lack of detailed documentation.
11. Failure to track requirements.
12. Failure to track progress.
13. Lack of detail in the project plans.
14. Inaccurate time and effort estimates.
15. Cultural differences in global projects.
All of these are influenced by people. Projects don’t fail or succeed - people do.
The shape of the project trajectory is the product of the interaction of 5 elements: governance (including competence, impact of stakeholders and political interest), robustness of the business case, how well defined the product or deliverable is, procurement philosophy and contracting models, technical and social complexity of the tasks during delivery. Unless you can see it, you can’t do anything about it.
Leadership plays a critical role in shaping the black box for mega projects and corporate change initiatives. Because we have a systematic bias toward people in authority - we expect them to set the tone and queues for our behaviours. People lower in the hierarchy tend to seek guidance and affirmation for their actions, take the path of least resistance (obey).
The black box at its core holds the 3Bs: beliefs (beliefs shape the actions that produce the outcomes even when the beliefs are wrong), biases, brilliance.
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. Heuristics is mental shortcuts, automated mental patterns based on previous experience. If those shortcuts don’t work, its cognitive biases (error in seeing, discrepancies between reality and their perception of reality, which influences their reasoning and decision making). Because of optimism bias people underestimate the costs, completion times and risks of planned actions, in contrast they overestimate the benefits of the same actions (the planning fallacy). Confirmation bias - seeing, what we already know (human brain registers information and data that confirm its preexisting beliefs and tends to ignore any information that might go against those beliefs). Our perception of reality is systematically biased, our performance is constrained by our mental models, based on our database of past experiences. 90% of what we see is projected from our memory and only 10% is added by fresh input from our sensory organs.
The authors grouped the biases into 3 categories for easier understanding: I (self-oriented biases that act systematically upon us both inside and outside of a project), We (group and social biases that affect our collaborations, teams and organizations), It (decision-making biases that condition our ability to evaluate information, assess situations effectively, make high quality decisions and perform with cognitive flexibility, when circumstances change).
10 checks along the flight path:
1. From working in to working on the project (the bigger picture, birds eye view). Central to it is the practice of displaying your project flight path or at least key segments of it in front of you. This physical separation between you and the project, allows for collaborative conversations between all key parties involved in the various stages of the project lifecycle.
2. Separate the facts of the project’s flight path from any fiction (judgements, opinions, fixed beliefs, and limiting conclusions accurate or false held by key stakeholders and project delivery teams) that may be present. There is also on emotional component to the fiction - emotions like simmering resentments, repressed anger, unexpressed upsets, focus on the past - if left unchecked, they drag the past into the future and perpetuate it.
3. Psychological safety - safe atmosphere for people to tell the truth, express their concerns and reveal their fears without being censored or punished for speaking up. Leadership happens through conversation.
4. Revealing beliefs - turning around a project in deep trouble. Look into the project’s black box.
5. The research phase - from big data to deep data. The birds view allows you a greater view of the project, from this vantage point you can ask Why? What? How? questions to understand the machinery of beliefs and biases running in the darkness of the black boss.
6. Activate your sonar - applying the flight path approach and taking action with the knowledge gained. Think about the project from a new perspective (the new info).
7. Leverage brilliance through conversations. Brilliance lives in the quality and depth of the daily conversations on the project. Any project is a box of conversations (network of conversations - tasks, processes, commitments, agreements, plans, performance, reports, monitoring, failures are conversations).
8. Project’s success or failure lives in the network of conversations. Conversations are more than transfer of information or messaging between parties. Powerful conversations provide context and meaning, build relationships and stakeholder commitment, engage and energize individuals, teams and organizations, deepen trust and loyalty, inspire and provide the bigger picture, generate organization and task clarity, mobilize action, coordinate expectations and identify problems, foster innovation, generate solutions and reveal learnings.
9. Silence is not golden - stepping over tricky issues, turning a blind eye or simply avoiding them is sure way to build up risk in your project.
10. Integrity in action - Leadership reputation = bold promises made * frequency of keeping them The size of your leadership correlates with the size of your promises. You must be aware of explicit promises (those made verbally) and implicit promises (those, people expect from you as respectable professional). Ultimately, what is behind corporate scandals is broken promises.
If you can picture the context, shaping the project’s story from multiple perspectives, you can make any project work.
Megaprojects - to design and set a new project on the path to success, or turn around your existing project and steer it to success.
White box - visible factors of project performance. Black box - hidden performance factors.
You have to be aware of the contextual factors that can impact performance (these are factors we have no influence over).
Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.
Typical project crash factors:
1. Poorly defined project scope.
2. Inadequate risk management.
3. Failure to identify key assumptions.
4. Project managers, who lack experience and training.
5. No use of formal methods and strategies.
6. Lack of effective communication at all levels.
7. Key staff leaving the project and/ or the company.
8. Poor management of expectations.
9. Ineffective leadership.
10. Lack of detailed documentation.
11. Failure to track requirements.
12. Failure to track progress.
13. Lack of detail in the project plans.
14. Inaccurate time and effort estimates.
15. Cultural differences in global projects.
All of these are influenced by people. Projects don’t fail or succeed - people do.
The shape of the project trajectory is the product of the interaction of 5 elements: governance (including competence, impact of stakeholders and political interest), robustness of the business case, how well defined the product or deliverable is, procurement philosophy and contracting models, technical and social complexity of the tasks during delivery. Unless you can see it, you can’t do anything about it.
Leadership plays a critical role in shaping the black box for mega projects and corporate change initiatives. Because we have a systematic bias toward people in authority - we expect them to set the tone and queues for our behaviours. People lower in the hierarchy tend to seek guidance and affirmation for their actions, take the path of least resistance (obey).
The black box at its core holds the 3Bs: beliefs (beliefs shape the actions that produce the outcomes even when the beliefs are wrong), biases, brilliance.
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. Heuristics is mental shortcuts, automated mental patterns based on previous experience. If those shortcuts don’t work, its cognitive biases (error in seeing, discrepancies between reality and their perception of reality, which influences their reasoning and decision making). Because of optimism bias people underestimate the costs, completion times and risks of planned actions, in contrast they overestimate the benefits of the same actions (the planning fallacy). Confirmation bias - seeing, what we already know (human brain registers information and data that confirm its preexisting beliefs and tends to ignore any information that might go against those beliefs). Our perception of reality is systematically biased, our performance is constrained by our mental models, based on our database of past experiences. 90% of what we see is projected from our memory and only 10% is added by fresh input from our sensory organs.
The authors grouped the biases into 3 categories for easier understanding: I (self-oriented biases that act systematically upon us both inside and outside of a project), We (group and social biases that affect our collaborations, teams and organizations), It (decision-making biases that condition our ability to evaluate information, assess situations effectively, make high quality decisions and perform with cognitive flexibility, when circumstances change).
10 checks along the flight path:
1. From working in to working on the project (the bigger picture, birds eye view). Central to it is the practice of displaying your project flight path or at least key segments of it in front of you. This physical separation between you and the project, allows for collaborative conversations between all key parties involved in the various stages of the project lifecycle.
2. Separate the facts of the project’s flight path from any fiction (judgements, opinions, fixed beliefs, and limiting conclusions accurate or false held by key stakeholders and project delivery teams) that may be present. There is also on emotional component to the fiction - emotions like simmering resentments, repressed anger, unexpressed upsets, focus on the past - if left unchecked, they drag the past into the future and perpetuate it.
3. Psychological safety - safe atmosphere for people to tell the truth, express their concerns and reveal their fears without being censored or punished for speaking up. Leadership happens through conversation.
4. Revealing beliefs - turning around a project in deep trouble. Look into the project’s black box.
5. The research phase - from big data to deep data. The birds view allows you a greater view of the project, from this vantage point you can ask Why? What? How? questions to understand the machinery of beliefs and biases running in the darkness of the black boss.
6. Activate your sonar - applying the flight path approach and taking action with the knowledge gained. Think about the project from a new perspective (the new info).
7. Leverage brilliance through conversations. Brilliance lives in the quality and depth of the daily conversations on the project. Any project is a box of conversations (network of conversations - tasks, processes, commitments, agreements, plans, performance, reports, monitoring, failures are conversations).
8. Project’s success or failure lives in the network of conversations. Conversations are more than transfer of information or messaging between parties. Powerful conversations provide context and meaning, build relationships and stakeholder commitment, engage and energize individuals, teams and organizations, deepen trust and loyalty, inspire and provide the bigger picture, generate organization and task clarity, mobilize action, coordinate expectations and identify problems, foster innovation, generate solutions and reveal learnings.
9. Silence is not golden - stepping over tricky issues, turning a blind eye or simply avoiding them is sure way to build up risk in your project.
10. Integrity in action - Leadership reputation = bold promises made * frequency of keeping them The size of your leadership correlates with the size of your promises. You must be aware of explicit promises (those made verbally) and implicit promises (those, people expect from you as respectable professional). Ultimately, what is behind corporate scandals is broken promises.
If you can picture the context, shaping the project’s story from multiple perspectives, you can make any project work.
March 27, 2023
Tangible methodology and mindset
This book crystallises the essence/unique ingredient in projects that work and are successful. It’s easy for stakeholders to stumble and eventually reach a destination- but that flight can be a pleasant ride, where all involved are delighted to have been involved. This book shows how. I began testing my learning today and received positive responses. It’s a must read for Project leaders.
This book crystallises the essence/unique ingredient in projects that work and are successful. It’s easy for stakeholders to stumble and eventually reach a destination- but that flight can be a pleasant ride, where all involved are delighted to have been involved. This book shows how. I began testing my learning today and received positive responses. It’s a must read for Project leaders.
April 14, 2025
Not a fan. Read it after a recommendation. If you're looking for a book on this topic suggest "How Big Things Get Done" instead.
Also, I found the authors attributing the touted zero-injury track record (across 50+M man-hours) of the Qatar Shell LTG megaproject not to clearly fraudulent numbers but instead to sincere safety messaging and bringing in a famous cricket player as a guest speaker to show they really cared an interesting take.
Also, I found the authors attributing the touted zero-injury track record (across 50+M man-hours) of the Qatar Shell LTG megaproject not to clearly fraudulent numbers but instead to sincere safety messaging and bringing in a famous cricket player as a guest speaker to show they really cared an interesting take.
April 12, 2025
Very good book. Really empress
April 12, 2025
The book is lauded for providing tangible methodologies. unique ingredient in projects that work and are successful.
April 12, 2025
Gorilla in the Cockpit is exactly as wild, heartwarming, and unexpectedly thoughtful as its title suggests.
April 12, 2025
High-altitude comedy quickly reveals layers of heart, social commentary, and unforgettable characters—both human and otherwise.
April 12, 2025
The cockpit scenes are dynamic, the sky-swept landscapes are breathtaking, and the blend of comedy and tension keeps you hooked.
April 12, 2025
It’s rare to find something that’s this fun and this smart. Whether you're in it for the laughs or the layers, Gorilla in the Cockpit is one flight worth boarding.
April 12, 2025
The book's grounding in facts versus concepts, finding it intriguing and informative for building a foundation for future megaprojects.
April 12, 2025
Every page had something valuable.
April 13, 2025
I recommend this to every member of my leadership team.
April 13, 2025
This is the book you didn’t know you desperately needed if you manage complex projects.
April 13, 2025
The authors offer not just critique, but real solutions. A rare find in business literature.
April 13, 2025
This book will rewire your thinking.
April 13, 2025
From procurement to sustainability, this book covers it all with precision and heart.
April 13, 2025
This book doesn’t just describe the problem—it dismantles it and builds a better path forward.
April 13, 2025
Packed with wisdom, case studies, and practical frameworks. It’s a masterclass in project success.
April 13, 2025
Invaluable for anyone responsible for large-scale initiatives. It should be required reading.
April 13, 2025
Expect radical clarity and actionable insight.
April 13, 2025
It goes where other books don’t dare to go—the human side of project collapse. And it does it brilliantly.
April 13, 2025
I’m sharing this with my entire PMO. The insights are too important to ignore.
April 13, 2025
The most honest and useful book on project failure I’ve ever read.
April 13, 2025
Deeply researched, yet completely accessible. I highlighted nearly every page.
April 13, 2025
More than a business strategy book—it's a wake-up call for any leader managing complexity and change.
April 13, 2025
What I learned from this book saved our organization from a massive strategic misstep.
April 13, 2025
This concept stuck with me. I now look at project breakdowns in a totally new way.
April 13, 2025
As someone working in infrastructure, I found this deeply relevant. Should be mandatory reading for policy makers.
April 14, 2025
This book gave me tools to reduce risk and deliver results. Highly effective.
April 14, 2025
Instead of blaming people, this book teaches us how to understand and adapt.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 45 reviews