“Why 99.5 Percent of Big Projects Blow Up, and How the Rest Don't”
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Title: How Big Things Get Done
Author: Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner
Category: Leadership & Team Building, Business Strategy, Focus, Habits & Productivity, Motivation & Self-Improvement
Bent Flyvbjerg spent decades building a database of over sixteen thousand projects, and 99.5 percent of them missed budget, schedule, or both. Sam and Sophie sit with that number for a minute, because it's not what you'd expect from the world's most celebrated builds.
The episode walks through the commitment fallacy and the two mechanisms underneath it, strategic misrepresentation and optimism bias, then lands on the book's central inversion: think slow, act fast. The Burj Khalifa's decade of modeling before five years of construction gets a turn, along with modularity (the Lego approach versus the pizza approach), reference class forecasting, the experience curve, and the tech fallacy. The Sydney Opera House and Denver's baggage system show up as cautionary tales, and the internet shows up as the counterexample to the megaproject itself.
If you've ever watched a project spiral and wondered why nobody saw it coming, this episode names the pattern and gives you a way to plan against it. The takeaway: the difference between a dream and a disaster isn't the size of the vision, it's the quality of the thinking that comes before it.
How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. If you want the full written summary, the whole library is on 7minutebooks.com/app — over 6,000 fiction and nonfiction titles you can read or listen to in any language, with unlimited access from $2.99 a month, $9.99 a year, or $19.99 lifetime.
Chapters
00:00The 99.5 Percent Failure Rate00:55Commitment Fallacy And Optimism Bias01:51Think Slow, Act Fast02:58Modularity And Reference Class Forecasting04:24The Experience Curve And Fat Tails05:46Tech Fallacy And The Megaproject Trap
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