Biases & Fallacies

Quality, Consequences and the Construction Industrial Complex (part 320).???

Do we need therapy to move past our biases and fallacies??

I am confident (see overconfidence bias below) that any therapist analyzing the construction industry and the people that work within it, would conclude we:

1. Suffer from multiple bias's and fallacies.?
2. Participate in multiple abusive relationships.
3. Work in an industry that has insolvency as a business model (see item 2 above). When the average net profit in the UK construction sector is between 0.5 and 1.0% this is a fair observation.

I saw a list of project management fallacies and biases in the Bent Flyvbjerg article “Top Ten Behavioral Biases in Project Management: An Overview” (2021 Project Management Journal).?

I could not stop thinking of times I had experienced all these on past projects and how building commissioning is impacted. Here is my amended list with the building commissioning context added.?

?I recognized myself in most of the above, so there is work to do on my part. If I had to pick 3 to really work?on, I will focus on:

1. Overconfidence Bias - be more reflective and humble. This will be hard for me!
2. Anchoring - become more aware of personal anchoring
3. Sunk Cost Fallacy - know when to pull the plug and not waste time and resources.

Thinking about Cobb’s Paradox – “We know why projects fail; we know how to prevent their failure – so why do they still fail?" (Martin Cobb, 1995).

To answer Martin Cobb, IMHO, humans do not like change. That's it. Projects fail because of human choices, group think, biases, fallacies, socialised risk and low personal consequences. I guess we all need to reflect and challenge our thinking.?

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