99% of Projects Don’t Go As Planned

Oxford economist Bent Flyvbjerg is an expert on failure. His new book “How Big Things Get Done” is at the top of my pile — partly because his research included “16,000 skyscrapers, airports, museums, concert halls, nuclear reactors, and hydroelectric dams across 136 countries”.

Making the Museum, you see, is all about strategies to help exhibition projects happen on time, on budget, to rave reviews. So Flyvbjerg’s statistics about major projects make me both nervous and determined:

47.9% are delivered on budget.
8.5% are delivered on budget, and on time.
0.5% are delivered on budget, on time, and with the expected benefits.

It turns out that one project in that rare 0.5% is Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The reason, per Flyvbjerg, is the years of planning done by the designers before starting to build.

Here’s the thing:
Spending extra time and resources on planning a project isn’t a luxury. It’s one of the only ways to avoid being in the 99% of projects that don’t go as planned.

Warmly,
Jonathan

P.S. More when I get “How Big Things Get Done” … done.