Finished reading: How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg 📚

Very helpful and practical book from the expert on “megaprojects” (i.e., large-scale, complex endeavors costing over $1 billion). The principles, though, seem quite relevant to smaller projects, as Flyvbjerg points out at several points.

Here is a sketchnote summary of the book:

In a coda at the end of the book, Flyvbjerg offers “Eleven Heuristics For Better Project Leadership” (pp. 185-90):

1. Hire a Masterbuilder

I sometimes say that this is my only heuristic because the masterbuilder—named after the skilled masons who built Europe’s medieval cathedrals—possesses all the phronesis needed to make your project happen. You want someone with deep domain experience and a proven track record of success in whatever you’re doing, whether it’s a home renovation, a wedding, an IT system, or a skyscraper. But masterbuilders aren’t always available or affordable, in which case you need to think further and consider some of the following.

2. Get Your Team Right

This is the only heuristic cited by every project leader I’ve ever met. Ed Catmull explained why: “Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better. If you get the team right, chances are they will get the ideas right.” But who should pick the team? Ideally, that’s the job of a masterbuilder. In fact, it’s the masterbuilder’s main job. This is why the role of master builder is not as solitary as it sounds; projects are delivered by teams. So to amend my advice above: When possible, hire a master builder. And the masterbuilder’s team.

3. Ask “Why?"

Asking why you’re doing your project will focus you on what matters, your ultimate purpose, and your result. This goes into the box on the right of your project chart. As the project sails into a storm of events and details, good leaders never lose sight of the ultimate result. “No matter where I am and what I’m doing in the delivery process,” noted Andrew Wolstenholme, the leader who delivered Heathrow’s Terminal 5 in chapter 8, “I check myself constantly by asking whether my present actions effectively contribute to the result on the right.” (See chapter 3.)

4. Build with Lego

Big is best built from small. Bake one small cake. Bake another. And another. Then stack them. Decoration aside, that’s all there really is to even the most towering wedding cake. As with wedding cakes, so with solar and wind farms, server farms, batteries, container shipping, pipelines, roads. They’re all profoundly modular, built with a basic building block. They can scale up like crazy, getting better, faster, bigger, and cheaper as they do. The small cake is the Lego brick—the basic building block—of the wedding cake. The solar panel is the Lego of the solar farm. The server is the Lego of the server farm. This potent little idea has been applied to software, subways, hardware, hotels, office buildings, schools, factories, hospitals, rockets, satellites, cars, and app stores. Its applicability is limited only by imagination. So what’s your Lego? (See chapter 9.)

5. Think Slow, Act Fast

What’s the worst that can happen during planning? Maybe your whiteboard is accidentally erased. What’s the worst that can happen during delivery? Your drill breaks through the ocean floor, flooding the tunnel. Just before you release your movie, a pandemic closes theaters. You ruin the most beautiful vista in Washington, DC. You have to dynamite months of work on the opera house, clear away the rubble, and start over. Your overpass collapses, killing dozens of people. And so much more. Almost any nightmare you can imagine can happen—and has happened—during deliver. You want to limit your exposure to this. You do it by taking all the time necessary to create a detailed, tested plan. Planning is relatively cheap and safe; delivering is expensive and dangerous. Good planning boosts the odds of a quick, effective delivery, keeping the window on risk small and closing it as soon as possible. (See chapter 1.)

6. Take the Outside View

Your project is special, but unless you are doing what has literally never been done before—building a time machine, engineering a black hole—it is not unique; it is part of a larger class of projects. Think of your project as “one of those,” gather data, and learn from all the experience those numbers represent by making reference-class forecasts. Use the same focus to spot and mitigate risks. Switching the focus from your project to the class your project belongs to will lead, paradoxically, to a more accurate understanding of your project. (See chapter 6.)

7. Watch Your Downside

It’s often said that opportunity is as important as risk. That’s false. Risk can kill you and your project. No upside can compensate for that. For fat-tailed risk, which is present in most projects, forget about forecasting risk; go directly to mitigation by spotting and eliminating dangers. A rider in the grueling three-week Tour de France bicycle race explained that participating is not about winning but about not losing, each day for twenty-one days. Only after that can you consider winning. Successful project leaders think like that; they focus on not losing, every day, while keeping a keen eye on the prize, the goal they are trying to achieve.

8. Say No and Walk Away

Staying focused is essential for getting projects done. Saying no is essential for staying focused. At the outset, will the project have the people and funds, including contingencies, needed to succeed? If not, walk away. Does an action contribute to achieving the goal in the box on the right? If not, skip it. Say no to monuments. No to untested technology. No to lawsuits. And so on. This can be difficult, particularly if your organization embraces a bias for action. But saying no is essential for the success of a project and an organization. “I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done,” Steve Jobs once observed. The things not done helped Apple stay focused on a few products that became wildly successful because of that focus, according to Jobs.

9. Make Friends and Keep Them Friendly

A leader of a multibillion-dollar public sector IT project told me he spent more than half his time acting like a diplomat, cultivating the understanding and support of stakeholders who could significantly influence his project. Why? It’s risk management. If something goes wrong, the project’s fate depends on the strength of those relationships. And when something goes wrong, it’s too late to start developing and cultivating them. Build your bridges before you need them.

10. Build Climate Mitigation into Your Project

No task is more urgent today than mitigating the climate crisis—not only for the common good but for your organization, yourself, and your family. Aristotle defined phronesis as the dual ability to see what things are good for people and to get those things done. 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. In fact, it’s already happening, as we saw in chapter 9. Now it’s a matter of quickly accelerating and scaling up the effort with thousands more mitigation (and adaptation) projects, large and small, following the principles laid out in this book—which was a main motivation for writing it and for hammering out this list of heuristics.

11. Know That Your Biggest Risk is You

It’s tempting to think that projects fail because the world throws surprises at us: price and scope changes, accidents, weather, new management—the list goes on. But this is shallow thinking. The Great Chicago Fire Festival failed not because Jim Lasko couldn’t predict the exact chain of circumstances that led to the malfunction of the ignition system (see chapter 6); it failed because he took the inside view on his project and didn’t study how failure typically occurs for live events as a class. Why didn’t he? Because focusing on the particular case and ignoring the class is what human psychology inclines us to do. The greatest threat Lasko faced wasn’t out in the world; it was in his own head, in his behavioral biases. This is true for every one of us and every project. Which is why your biggest risk is you.