Created at: 2026-05-02
This book was an indirect recommendation from a colleague at Kraken. He shared a book list with some of his favourite and/or most influential books that shaped the way he thinks about software development and management.
After being intrigued by the title I picked this book up and start chipping away at it. The book is approachable and easy to read, but it faces the same issues as of a lot of other modern non-fiction books: the ratio of fluff to information is very high. Notably, anecdotes and stories are regurgitated many times to stress a point that isn't remotely hard to understand in the first place. This is a bit of a reinforcement bias for me on why I don't usually read soft non-fiction books unless they have stood the test of time.
I am not a book snob (I literally read everything) and I am in no rush to read a good book when I get into it (even if it has lots of anecdotes) but the repetition in this book does not provide an added value to me. Granted, I work in IT which is, according to the author, one of the most complex industries in the world to estimate and manage costs, only second to nuclear waste management. So my expectations are high when I picked this book. Surely I could get some insight that would help me with my day to day work, but I am not sure I got that.
Some of the data in here is interesting, and it is probably the best part of the book for me, but I don't think I have acquired a deep insight into how big projects get done, perhaps the book is to short for that.
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
18 percent of IT projects have cost overruns above 50 percent in real terms. And for those projects the average overrun is 447 percent! That’s the average in the tail, meaning that many IT projects in the tail have even higher overruns than this. Information technology is truly fat-tailed!16 So are nuclear storage projects. And the Olympic Games. And nuclear power plants. And big hydroelectric dams. As are airports, defense projects, big buildings, aerospace projects, tunnels, mining projects, high-speed rail, urban rail, conventional rail, bridges, oil projects, gas projects, and water projects.
From the dramatic to the mundane to the trivial, change can rattle or ruin a project—if it occurs during the window of time when the project is ongoing. Solution? Close the window. Of course, a project can’t be completed instantly, so we can’t close the window entirely. But we can make the opening radically smaller by speeding up the project and bringing it to a conclusion faster.
If you want to win a contract or get a project approved, superficial planning is handy because it glosses over major challenges, which keeps the estimated cost and time down, which wins contracts and gets projects approved. But as certain as the law of gravity, challenges
If you want to win a contract or get a project approved, superficial planning is handy because it glosses over major challenges, which keeps the estimated cost and time down, which wins contracts and gets projects approved. But as certain as the law of gravity, challenges ignored
Unchecked, optimism leads to unrealistic forecasts, poorly defined goals, better options ignored, problems not spotted and dealt with, and no contingencies to counteract the inevitable surprises. Yet, as we will see in later chapters, optimism routinely displaces hard-nosed analysis in big projects, as in so much else people do.
Using a best-case scenario as the basis for an estimate is a really bad idea because the best case is seldom the most likely way the future will unfold.
Brown, a former San Francisco mayor and California state assemblyman. “We always knew the initial estimate was under the real cost. Just like we never had a real cost for the Central Subway or the Bay Bridge or any other massive construction project. So get off it. In the world of civic projects, the first budget is really just a down payment. If people knew the real cost from the start, nothing would ever be approved”
Governments and bureaucratic corporations are good at churning out this sort of analysis. It is a major reason why the California High-Speed Rail project was able to spend more than a decade “in planning” before construction began, producing impressive quantities of paper and numbers without delivering a plan worthy of the name.
Governments and bureaucratic corporations are good at churning out this sort of analysis. It is a major reason why the California High-Speed Rail project was able to spend more than a decade “in planning” before construction began, producing impressive quantities of paper and numbers without delivering a plan worthy of the name. In contrast, good planning explores, imagines, analyzes, tests, and iterates. That takes time. Thus, slow is a consequence of doing planning right, not a cause.
an iterative process such as Pixar’s corrects for a basic cognitive bias that psychologists call the “illusion of explanatory depth.” Do you know how a bicycle works? Most people are sure they do, yet they are unable to complete a simple line drawing that shows how a bicycle works. Even when much of the bicycle is already drawn for them, they can’t do it. “People feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do,”
an iterative process such as Pixar’s corrects for a basic cognitive bias that psychologists call the “illusion of explanatory depth.” Do you know how a bicycle works? Most people are sure they do, yet they are unable to complete a simple line drawing that shows how a bicycle works. Even when much of the bicycle is already drawn for them, they can’t do it. “People feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do,” researchers concluded.
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.
7 The consensus of researchers today is that, yes, being first to market can confer advantages in certain specific circumstances, but it comes at the terrible cost of an inability to learn from the experience of others. Better to be—like Apple following Blackberry into smartphones—a “fast follower” and learn from the first mover.
People who work with a tool learn how to use it, so they gain knowledge such as “The safety lock must be turned off before the tool can start.” You don’t actually need experience to get that sort of knowledge. Someone can just tell you, or you can find it in a manual; it is “explicit knowledge.” But as the scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi showed, much of the most valuable knowledge we can possess and use isn’t like that; it is “tacit knowledge.” We feel tacit knowledge. And when we try to put it into words, the words never fully capture it. As Polanyi wrote, “We can know more than we can tell.”
If there is a design—or a system, process, or technique—that has delivered many times before, use it, or tweak it, or mix-and-match it with similarly proven designs. Use off-the-shelf technologies. Hire experienced people. 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.
They struggled on somehow. It took Caro seven years to finish his book. But a story that seemed destined to be a tragedy ended in triumph. When The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York was finally published in 1974, it won the Pulitzer Prize and became an improbable bestseller. Not only is the book still in print, it is considered one of the greatest dissections of political power ever written.
And thanks to the care you took in measuring and counting everything down to the smallest detail and getting the right prices, it must be reliable, too. Or so you assume. You start the project by tearing out the existing flooring. And you discover mold in the floorboards. Then you tear out drywall. And you discover old wiring that violates the current building code. Later, your prized granite countertops are delivered. You slip while carrying a slab, breaking it in two.
And things almost never go according to plan. On big projects, they don’t even come close.
I came to call this process “reference-class forecasting” (RCF).11 After I developed it for Gordon Brown, the British government used it to forecast the time and cost of major projects and was so satisfied with the results that it made the process mandatory.12 Denmark did the same.
Daniel Kahneman wrote in Thinking, Fast and Slow that using reference-class forecasting is “the single most important piece of advice regarding how to increase accuracy in forecasting through improved methods.”
Kahneman identified optimism bias as “the most significant of the cognitive biases.”14 An optimistic benefit estimate is clearly an overestimate, which is the prediction of Kahneman and behavioral science for project planning.
There are always other costs—costs that never appear on any spreadsheet—when a project spirals out of control. The simplest are what economists call “opportunity costs”: the money unnecessarily burned by bad planning that could have been used to fund something else, including other projects. How many triumphs and wonders has bad planning stolen from us? We’ll never know.
there’s reason to think that desperation may actually hinder the imaginative moments that elevate a project to glory. Psychologists have studied the effects of stress on creativity for decades, and there is now a substantial literature showing that it has a largely—though not entirely—negative effect. A 2010 meta-analysis of seventy-six studies found that stress is particularly corrosive in two circumstances: when we feel that the situation is mostly beyond our control and when we feel that others are judging our competence.
A strong plan greatly increases the probability of a swift and successful delivery. But it’s not enough. As any experienced project manager will tell you, you also need a capable, determined delivery team. The success of any project depends on getting the team right—“getting the right people on the bus,” as one colleague metaphorically put it, “and placing them in the right seats,” as another added.
In fact, the best-performing project types in my entire database, by a comfortable margin, are wind and solar power.
Monju is an extreme case, but it’s not in a category by itself. Far from it. Nuclear power plants are one of the worst-performing project types in my database, with an average cost overrun of 120 percent in real terms and schedules running 65 percent longer than planned.
Even if you do have some experience building nuclear power plants, you probably won’t have experience building this particular nuclear plant because, with few exceptions, each plant is specifically designed for a specific site, with technology that changes over time. Like Monju, it is bespoke, one of a kind. Anything bespoke is expensive and slow to make, like a tailored suit.
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.That’s exactly what happened to Monju. More than a quarter century after the project was launched, when the plant was still not ready to go, an earthquake caused a tsunami that struck the nuclear plant at Fukushima, producing the disaster that turned public opinion against nuclear power and finally convinced the Japanese government to pull the plug on Monju.
What is our basic building block, the thing we will repeatedly make, becoming smarter and better each time we do so? That’s the question every project leader should ask. What is the small thing we can assemble in large numbers into a big thing? Or a huge thing? What’s our Lego?
China is a critical case in the sense that it is the nation in the world with the most conducive conditions for nuclear power. So if nuclear power doesn’t succeed in scaling up there, it is unlikely to succeed anywhere—unless, of course, the nuclear industry disrupts itself, which is exactly what its more enlightened proponents now suggest. They have come to accept the limitations of the “one huge thing” model and are trying to take nuclear power in a radically different direction. They call for scaled-down reactors to be built in factories, shipped to where they are needed, and assembled on-site, again transforming the construction site into an assembly site, which is rightly seen as the key to success.
Give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better. If you get the team right, chances are they will get the ideas right.”
SAY NO AND WALK AWAY Staying focused is essential for getting projects done. Saying no is essential for staying focused. At the outset, will the project have the people and funds, including contingencies, needed to succeed? If not, walk away. Does an action contribute to achieving the goal in the box on the right? If not, skip it. Say no to monuments. No to untested technology. No to lawsuits. And so on. This can be difficult, particularly if your organization embraces a bias for action.