How Big Things Get Done – a review

Prof. Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner’s new book, “How Big Things Get Done,” is one of the most important books I’ve ever read.

Its premise might seem dry: how do we deliver complex projects on schedule and on budget, as reliably and efficiently as possible? But a second look reveals the book is relevant to all of us. After all, we will all be paying for a major project at some point in our life, be it our wedding, a house renovation, or – as a taxpayer – a stadium or metro line. Hence why it’s in everyone’s interest to learn the simple principles that keep project costs in check and the red flags that might make them explode.

The book is full of fascinating examples of failures and successes. For instance, you will learn about a New York couple whose kitchen renovation ended up costing more than four times what they budgeted. And one of the many tips Flyvbjerg gives us is not to budget starting from the specifics of our kitchen but rather to look at the average final cost of similar kitchen renovations and then adjust from there. This process, called “reference-class forecasting,” or RCF, reduces the impact of bias and surprises. I’ve learned to apply it when estimating the costs of my consulting projects, and I can confirm it’s more accurate than more tailored approaches.

As another example, the book tells us how Madrid used the principles of modularity to build its subway at twice the speed and half the cost of the industry average. (If this doesn’t seem impressive, consider that doing so saved ~$400 per Madrid resident – how happy would you be to receive such a check in your mail? Perhaps, it’s worth holding our local politicians accountable for following megaproject planning best practices so that we can all save similar amounts of money.)?

I found particularly interesting the story of the Montreal Olympic Games of 1976, which went a whopping 720% over budget, resulting in a gigantic deficit that took decades to pay off – just the stadium cost taxpayers $2.4 billion, an average of $102 per person! But, as Flyvbjerg points out, this figure doesn’t capture the total costs. We should also consider the missed benefit from all the infrastructure the city could have built with that extra money (but didn’t).

The book lists many useful heuristics. The one I could relate to the most is “watch your downside” – something most people understand conceptually but few apply in practice, perhaps because they exclude a priori certain failure modes. One of the ways I force the application of this heuristic in the projects I advise is to draw an Ishikawa diagram of possible failures and then, for each, assume it happened and ask myself what could have caused it and how I can prevent it. Another trick I use to spot blindspots is to imagine receiving a missed call in the middle of the night from my project manager and asking myself, what could have caused them to call me?

Anticipating failure is essential, for – as I wrote in my book on ergodicity, “performance is subordinate to survival, and irreversible losses absorb future gains.” It’s not the best design we remember, but the best design of those that got built and stood the test of time. And the costs of a budget overrun aren’t just the money lost but also the missed benefits of everything else it could have bought.

In their book, Flyvbjerg and Gardner also discuss successes, such as the Empire State Building, which achieved construction speeds of more than a story a day (!) and finished on schedule and below budget, thanks to a series of reasons that the book examines well (no spoiler).

How much would we gain, as a society, from implementing megaproject management best practices? Towards the end of the book, Flyvbjerg estimates savings of $300 to $400 billion per year – a tenth of what some say would be needed to end global hunger.?

If you find this number hard to relate, look up how much your city recently spent on megaprojects, take a third of that as a conservative example of what best practices could save, divide it by the number of residents, and imagine receiving that check in your mailbox. That would probably be a lot!

Were the principles of this book more widely known and required of decision-makers and project managers, infrastructure would become cheaper, making our lives easier and richer. Hence why I genuinely believe this is one of the most important books of our time.

But this book is not just for commissioners of large projects. It’s a book for everyone, because we all become project managers at some point in our life, be it for our wedding or house renovation. And even if those events occur only once, a mistake in their budgeting or planning can cost us thousands of dollars – sometimes multiples of what we budgeted. Better invest in reading this book, and learn how to prevent bad surprises.?

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