How Big Things Get Done

Projects that fail tend to drag on, while those that succeed zip along and finish. Why is that? Think of the duration of a project as an open window. The longer the duration, the more open the window. The more open the window, the more opportunity for something to crash through and cause trouble, including a big, bad black swan.

Planning is pushing the vision to the point where it is sufficiently researched, analyzed, tested, and detailed that we can be confident we have a reliable road map of the way forward.

Planning is a safe harbor. Delivery is venturing across the storm-tossed seas.

Spotting the implications of different options and approaches takes more time. Puzzling through complex problems, coming up with solutions, and putting them to the test take still more time. Planning requires thinking—and creative, critical, careful thinking is slow.

Rome’s first emperor, the mighty Caesar Augustus, whose personal motto was “Festina lente,” or “Make haste slowly.”

To generate snap judgments, the brain can’t be overly demanding about information. Instead, it proceeds on the basis of what Kahneman calls “WYSIATI” (What You See Is All There Is), meaning an assumption that whatever information we have on hand is all the information available to make the decision.

Projects are often started by jumping straight to a solution, even a specific technology. That’s the wrong place to begin. You want to start by asking questions and considering alternatives. At the outset, always assume that there is more to learn. Start with the most basic question of all: Why?

In contrast, good planning explores, imagines, analyzes, tests, and iterates. That takes time. Thus, slow is a consequence of doing planning right, not a cause. The cause of good planning is the range and depth of the questions it asks and the imagination and the rigor of the answers it delivers.

Developing a clear, informed understanding of what the goal is and why—and never losing sight of it from beginning to end—is the foundation of a successful project.

Think of how people typically learn: We tinker. We try this. We try that. We see what works and what doesn’t. We iterate. We learn. This is experimentation creating experience. Or, to use the phrase of theorists, it is “experiential learning.” We’re good at learning by tinkering—which is fortunate, because we’re terrible at getting things right the first time.

we do not make the most of experience because we do not appreciate how deeply experience can enrich judgment and improve project planning and leadership.

Put simply, the typical project is one in which costs are underestimated and benefits are overestimated. Picture a big project that costs more than it was supposed to and delivered less than expected: That description fit four out of five projects.

Kahneman identified optimism bias as “the most significant of the cognitive biases.”14 An optimistic benefit estimate is clearly an overestimate, which is the prediction of Kahneman and behavioral science for project planning.

“what I’m constantly trying to do is slow things down,” he says. Take time to develop ideas. Take time to spot and correct problems. Do it on the drafting table, not the construction site. “If you slow things down sometimes and you take a second and a third look, you end up making less mistakes,” he says. “And that means [the project gets done] faster.”

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

Heuristics are fast and frugal rules of thumb used to simplify complex decisions. The word has its origin in the ancient Greek word Eureka!, the cry of joy and satisfaction when one finds or discovers something.1 “Think slow, act fast” is an example of a heuristic.

WATCH YOUR DOWNSIDE It’s often said that opportunity is as important as risk. That’s false. Risk can kill you or your project. No upside can compensate for that.

family. Aristotle defined phronesis as the dual ability to see what things are good for people and to get those things done.