Quotes from Bent Flyvbjerg

Projects are not goals in themselves. Projects are how goals are achieved. People don't build skyscrapers, hold conferences, develop products, or write books for their own sakes. They do these things in order to accomplish other things.

At the beginning of a project, we need to disrupt the psychology-driven dash to a premature conclusion by disentangling means and ends and thinking carefully about what exactly we want to accomplish. Frank Gehry's question, "Why are you doing this project?," does that.

Are the benchmarks reasonable? Logically, that should be the first question that is asked, but it rarely comes up at all. Once we frame the problem as one of time and money overruns, it may never occur to us to consider that the real source of the problem is not overruns at all; it is underestimation. This project was doomed by a large underestimate. And the underestimate was caused by a bad anchor. To create a successful project estimate, you must get the anchor right.

You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology," Steve Jobs told the audience at Apple's 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference. "You can't start with the technology and try to figure out how you're going to try to sell it. I made this mistake probably more than anybody in this room, and I've got the scar tissue to prove it."[9] Today, "work backwards" is a mantra in Silicon Valley.

Nevertheless, with respect to cost development, there is a striking similarity between these and other major projects: there is a tendency towards a significant underestimation of costs during project appraisal. This is also the conclusion we draw when we review data from a large number of major transport infrastructure projects, and from other types of project as well.

Projects are not goals in themselves. Projects are how goals are achieved. People don't build skyscrapers

Exhaustive planning that enables swift delivery, narrowing the time window that black swans can crash through, is an effective means of mitigating this risk. Finishing is the ultimate form of black swan prevention; after a project is done, it can't blow up, at least not as regards delivery.

The critical next step is to stop thinking of black swans the way most people do. They are not bolt-from-the-blue freak accidents that are impossible to understand or prevent. They can be studied. And mitigated.

In the social sciences, "survivorship bias" is the common mistake of noting only those things that made it through some selection process while overlooking those that didn't.

As with reference-class forecasting, the big hurdle to black swan management is overcoming uniqueness bias. If you imagine that your project is so different from other projects that you have nothing to learn from them, you will overlook risks that you would catch and mitigate if you instead switched to the outside view.

The cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead supposedly told her students, "You're absolutely unique, just like everyone else." Projects are like that. Whatever sets a project apart, it shares other characteristics with projects in its class.

Good planning that sweeps away ignorance will indeed reveal difficulties ahead, but that is no reason to quit and walk away.

We do not have to be desperate to be creative. Indeed, there's reason to think that desperation may actually hinder the imaginative moments that elevate a project to glory.

See your project as one in a class of similar projects already done, as "one of those." Use data from that class—about cost, time, benefits, or whatever else you want to forecast—as your anchor. Then adjust up or down, if necessary, to reflect how your specific project differs from the mean in the class. That's it.

I know from experience that people sometimes struggle with this, not because it's complicated but because it's simple. It's too simple. Their project is special, after all, or so they think, and this process doesn't emphasize that, so they complicate the process.

The value of experienced teams cannot be overstated, yet it is routinely disregarded.

The word deadline comes from the American Civil War, when prison camps set boundaries and any prisoner who crossed a line was shot.

We know what's good: climate mitigation, for instance, by electrifying everything—homes, cars, offices, factories, shops—and making sure that the electricity comes from abundant renewable sources. We have the ability to do this.

We perform at our best when we feel united, empowered, and mutually committed to accomplishing something worthwhile.

This time is different" is the motto of uniqueness bias.

There's a word to describe a group of people who feel that way: they are a team.

BAA understood, as so many others do not, that "lowest bid" does not necessarily mean "lowest cost," so rather than follow the common practice of hiring the lowest bidders, BAA stuck with companies it had worked with for years and that had proven their ability to deliver what BAA needed.

Identity was the first step. Purpose was the second. It had to matter that you worked for T5.

Harvard professor Amy Edmondson dubbed this sense of being free to speak your mind "psychological safety." It's hard to overstate its value. Psychological safety boosts morale, fosters improvements, and ensures that, in Andrew Wolstenholme's words, "bad news travels fast"—so problems can be tackled quickly.