Quotes from Bent Flyvbjerg

There are five project types that are not fat-tailed. That means they may come in somewhat late or over budget but it's very unlikely that they will go disastrously wrong. The fortunate five? They are solar power, wind power, fossil thermal power (power plants that generate electricity by burning fossil fuels), electricity transmission, and roads. In fact, the best-performing project types in my entire database, by a comfortable margin, are wind and solar power.

And why are wind and solar power the most reliable projects of all, more likely than any other project type to be delivered successfully?

One way to design and deliver a project on an enormous scale is to build one thing. One huge thing.

By now you know the solution to the puzzle I discussed at the end of the previous chapter: Only five project types—solar power, wind power, fossil thermal power, electricity transmission, and roads—are not fat-tailed, meaning that they, unlike all the rest, do not have a considerable risk of going disastrously wrong. So what sets the fortunate five apart? They are all modular to a considerable degree, some extremely so.

If you build like this, you build only one thing. By definition, that thing is one of a kind. To put that in the language of tailors, it is bespoke:

And that translates into slow and complex. Nuclear power plants, for one, are the products of a staggering number of bespoke parts and systems that must all work, and work together, for the plant as a whole to work.

First, you can't build a nuclear power plant quickly, run it for a while, see what works and what doesn't, then change the design to incorporate the lessons learned.

Second, there's a problem with experience—the other half of experiri. If you are building a nuclear power plant, chances are that you haven't done much of that before for the simple reason that few have been built and each takes many years to complete, so opportunities to develop experience are scarce.

To pitch a new project at Amazon, you must first write a PR and FAQ, putting the goal smack in the opening sentences of the press release. Everything that happens subsequently is working backwards from the PR/FAQ, as it is called at Amazon. Critically, the language of both documents must be plain. "I called it 'Oprah-speak,' " says Ian McAllister, a former Amazon executive

Third, there's the financial strain. A nuclear power plant must be completely finished before it can generate any electricity. Even nine-tenths done, it's useless.

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.

Asking "Why?" can work only where people feel free to speak their minds and the decision makers really listen. "Many employees who worked on the Fire Phone had serious doubts about it," concluded the journalist and author Brad Stone, who has written definitive histories of Amazon, "but no one, it seemed, had been brave or clever enough to take a stand and win an argument with their obstinate leader.

Infrastructure is the great space shrinker, and power, wealth and status increasingly belong to those who know how to shrink space, or know how to benefit from space being shrunk.

We're good at learning by tinkering—which is fortunate, because we're terrible at getting things right the first time.

Megaproject development today is not a field of what has been called 'honest numbers'.14 It is a field where you will see one group of professionals calling the work of another not only 'biased' and 'seriously flawed' but a 'grave embarrassment' to the profession.

Communicative and deliberative approaches work well as ideals and evaluative yardsticks for decision making, but they are quite defenceless in the face of power.

We have documented in this book that: • Cost overruns of 50 per cent to 100 per cent in real terms are common in megaprojects; overruns above 100 per cent are not uncommon; • Demand forecasts that are wrong by 20 per cent to 70 per cent compared with actual developments are common; • The extent and magnitude of actual environmental impacts of projects are often very different from forecast impacts. Post-auditing is neglected;

strong incentives and weak disincentives for cost underestimation and thus for cost overrun may have taught project promoters what there is to learn, namely that cost underestimation and overrun pay off. If this is the case, cost overrun must be expected and it must be expected to be intentional.

Uncertainty in estimating viability is related in this way not only to the innate difficulty of predicting the future but also to power and interests.

Cost underestimation and overrun have not decreased over the past seventy years. No learning seems to take place; • Cost underestimation and overrun cannot be explained by error and seem to be best explained by strategic misrepresentation, namely lying, with a view to getting projects started.

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost. For want of a rider, the battle was lost. For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost.

Small is good. For one thing, small projects can be simple.

It's relatively easy to build something small and simple.

Modularity is a clunky word for the elegant idea of big things made from small things. A block of Lego is a small thing, but by assembling more than nine thousand of them, you can build one of the biggest sets Lego makes, a scale model of the Colosseum in Rome. That's modularity.