Think slow, act fast
Dr Hugo Minney, FRSA CMgr ChPP
Inspired to inspire, and that progress comes from accurate information
I’ve just begun reading Prof. Bent Flyvbjerg new book “How Big Things Get Done ”. I’ve reached the contradiction - some big things get done in a different way. So let’s look at how most big things get done.
Think Slow, Act Fast
Flyvbjerg explains that projects are far more likely to succeed if you plan a lot, do trial runs, and perhaps most importantly, have a lot of experience.
He illustrates this with examples from construction (Empire State building, Guggenheim Bilbao); moviemaking (Pixar’s movies with specific reference to “Inside Out”). In every case they share the same thing – that failing to plan is planning to fail. Projects that are planned in great detail are much more likely to do what they said they do – to be built on time, and to deliver the anticipated benefits. Projects with less planning, or less experience, are likely to run over time and over budget (he illustrates this with Sidney Opera House, Spielberg’s “Jaws” and Hopper’s “Easy Rider”, the Olympics which have endless planning but usually without experience). The contrasting examples given in the book are the projects that ran over time and budget (because they didn’t plan enough) but still realised benefits. Most projects that fail to plan, both run over budget and over time, and fail to achieve benefits, but because they achieved few benefits, they get forgotten.
It’s the same in all sectors – at least that’s Flyvbjerg’s contention and my experience isn't as extensive as his.
What is planning?
Flyvbjerg goes on to illustrate “planning”. It’s a lot more than just book smarts and fancy software (sorry, project planning software publishers!). A lot of the "planning" is about having done something similar before – tacit knowledge (things that might be impossible to write down, or to understand fully if you were to read them):
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It reminds me of that game where a team builds a tower with marshmallows and dry spaghetti – supposedly, junior schoolkids can do better than MBA project managers, because the MBA project managers try to plan everything theoretically and then build once, whereas the kids build a small tower, take it apart and build a bigger one, understanding both the dynamics of the material (as opposed to making assumptions), and building a “spaghetti construction muscle memory”.
Benefits realisation/ROI
Those who know Flyvbjerg know that he is particularly interested in benefits realisation across a portfolio, and across projects of a similar type. Flyvbjerg created Reference Classed Forecasting (RCF). He designed it to be simple – reading between the lines I think he thinks we’ve made RCF too “clever”, too “book smart”, and as a result we’re back to the cognitive biases and untruths that RCF was designed to overcome.
People and projects are not unique, we are much more predictable on average, and the gist of the message in Flyvbjerg’s book is that mistakes happen when we fail to learn from the lessons of the past. For example, now that AI is available to the general public (ChatGPT, BardAI, Dall-E etc), we can see just how dumb "book smarts" (very powerful data analytics) can be, how confidently AI makes big mistakes. It doesn't know what it doesn't know, it doesn't learn from the past because it doesn't learn at all, it just calculates.
Doing projects well
Flyvbjerg cut his teeth on major and megaprojects, and then spent a second lifetime analysing and understanding what could go wrong, and what needs to be done to make it go right. Perhaps we should take note (and to take practical action) about his assertion that no project is completely unique.
The more different a project is from similar projects that we could learn from, the more we need to do pilots and dummy runs. The less experience the delivery partner has, the more that delivery partner should seek to gain experience before embarking on the big risk of a final delivery. And of course, we need to make more effort to understand each of the stakeholders and use their knowledge and experience (which probably isn't written down), to ensure that we aren’t missing something important and that we will actually realise some benefits.
Helping leaders and project professionals be at their best irrespective of circumstances. Author of Helpful Questions Change Lives on Substack.
1 年I think the main contribution this book makes is it brings the what-you-see-is-all-there-is syndrome into sharper focus and, potentially, makes conversations about its limitations easier to have. When I have frank, reflective conversations with individual construction professionals, they may use different terminology, but in essence they’re perfectly aware of cognitive biases such as “optimism”, “sunk cost, commitment and planning fallacies”, as well as political, power-based ones like “strategic misrepresentation”. Their challenge is crafting a project culture in which these are surfaced and welcomed in as a stimulus to innovation or breaking the mould. Too often biases are kept buried or skated over on the pretext of not wasting time and money, when the real reason is to avoid the risk of offending someone.
Train, Engage and Design smarter
1 年"fail 2 plan = plan 2 fail" nicely put. keep up the great work. Thanks Simon Wood for the referral - you are right - iterative 3D optionising, communicating, integrating in real time makes failures go away, that's why our smart clients do it and win big.
Teacher & Coach in Projects and Procurement
1 年This readable book illustrates several important aspects of managing projects Dr Hugo Minney, FRSA CMgr ChPP, though I wouldn't summarise it as 'plan in more detail'. If anything it is more about *what* to do during the so-called planning phase. It suggests planning should involve exploration, iteration and experimenting, not just 'more detail.?The lesson isn't more activities in your P6 schedule.?It is about reducing execution risk by experimentation, practice and rehearsal rather than by Monte Carlo calculation. Your point of not learning from the past is very relevant here.?Research has shown that rushing into execution before sufficient preparation has been carried out is a recipe for blown budgets, overuns and performance shortfalls. This to me is the key message of the book.?A known risk described in a readable way. I'm afraid his claim that in the 1990s "no one" could answer the question about project failures and that "The data simply hadn’t been collected and analysed." (p5) is not true. He acknowledges Ed Merrow in the book and lists one of his publications in the bibliography. Merrow's company IPA was providing my employer ICI with advice on exactly this kind of stuff in the 90's, when BF said no one knew...
Consultant
1 年“Think for a long time, act for a short time” is the Japanese saying most closely analogous to “measure twice, cut once” in our traditional skills (like woodworking or tailoring). It is a maxim borne of frustration caused by inexperience. The fastest way to gain experience is to fail often and early in your career. Find the boundaries of the possible and the pitfalls for the unwary when the consequences are less onerous. Another Lean maxim is learn to fail fast. There is convergence everywhere there is “common sense”. Another great Oriental philosopher cautioned about planning in uncertain times when he said: “No plan survives first contact with the enemy”. Sun Tzu encourages us to plan with contingency and expedients in mind for when we encounter an unknown unknown. But he always has the goal, the benefits, in his mind throughout his writing. For a great many failed projects, inexperience, ego, ambition and politics (with a large and small P), are major contributory factors to the failure. That’s a lesson we seem never to assimilate.
I raise the value of my clients' decisions. Curator, benefitofexperience.com. Director, Keldale Business Services Ltd
1 年Good points, Hugo. Yes, we should learn from other people's mistakes and practice with pilots and dummy runs. I'd add that we need to do more thinking about the up-front choices as well, before we start piloting on stuff we've already committed to do. Having just come out of a portfolio office, it dawned on me how little correlation there was between the relative size of a programme and the exec thought that went into it. I'm not suggesting a fixed constant of leaders' brain-hours / ￡ invested, but there ought to be some trend that the big programmes have deeper consideration than the little ones.