Book review: How Big Things Get Done

There are certain books that shouldn't need to be written. Inevitably, those are the books that, in reality, most need to be written. That is certainly the case for How Big Things Get Done, by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. This is a book about big projects, and importantly, how those projects succeed or, as is often the case, how they fail. As the authors note in the preface, it is a book that aims to answer a number of important questions:

Why is the track record of big projects so bad? Even more important, what about the rare, tantalizing exceptions? Why do they succeed where so many others fail?

The book draws on decades of Flyvbjerg's academic research on big projects, as well as his experience both consulting on, and being directly involved in, big projects. Through this work, Flyvbjerg has developed a massive database of projects, their cost and benefit estimates at the time the project began, and the cost over-runs and benefit shortfalls that so often resulted. The numbers do not make for easy reading, and the examples that Flyvbjerg uses range from transport infrastructure to It projects to nuclear power stations to the Olympic Games. On the latter, the book is a useful complement to Andrew Zimbalist's book Circus Maximus (which I reviewed here).

Flyvbjerg and Gardner spend a lot of time discussing failed projects, but devote substantial space to discussing successes, such as Terminal 5 at Heathrow. Many of us will remember the opening of Heathrow for the terrible problems associated with baggage handling in the first few days of opening, but the project itself delivered on time and on budget. Once you read this book, you'll realise just how extraordinary that accomplishment is.

Flyvbjerg and Gardner use the comparison between successful projects and failures to draw a number of lessons. Most of the lessons seem obvious, but clearly those lessons have not been learned well enough in the 'big projects' space, because they are so often not heeded. The biggest lesson of all is to 'think slow, act fast'. Thinking slow means spending substantial time planning before the project begins, ensuring that the risks are well known and have been planned for, before the first spade turns the first sod. Acting fast means completing the project as quickly as possible, to avoid the 'unknown unknowns' from impacting the project - the more delays, the more time there is for something unforeseen to happen.

The 'think slow, act fast' approach seems inconsistent with Silicon Valley's approach to development (as ably described in Jonathan Taplin's 2017 book Move Fast and Break Things, which I reviewed here). Flyvbjerg and Gardner anticipate that counterexample, and note that the two are not inconsistent at all, because:

Planning is doing: Try something, see if it works, and try something else in light of what you've learned. Planning is iteration and learning before you deliver at full scale, with careful, demanding, extensive testing producing a plan that increases the odds of the delivery going smoothly and swiftly.

That is, more or less, what the big tech firms do. Flyvbjerg and Gardner note that iteration is key to those firms' development process, and is generally successful (or where it isn't, the firm can rapidly iterate to something new). In contrast, most big projects are delivered using a 'think fast, act slow' approach that is doomed to failure. 

I really enjoyed this book, even though it does seem quite depressing at times, just how badly big projects are at delivering on their promises (both in terms of costs, and in terms of benefits). The book is not only well researched, but draws on many interviews that Flyvbjerg has completed with people in the industry. The writing did make me wonder what Gardner's contribution was - the whole book is written as if by Flyvbjerg alone (with lots of "I" and "my"), which seems an odd stylistic choice for a co-authored book. Nevertheless it is an enjoyable read, and definitely recommended.