How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between

"Bent Flyvbjerg is one of the world’s major project gurus. He’s been writing books on mega projects for a couple of decades. This was his attempt, working with a Canadian journalist, to write something a bit less academic and easier to get your head around. It’s not talking just about government projects in the way that I do. It’s probably more focused on physical asset projects—bridges and buildings and roads and railways etc. It’s a good read, and even though it’s 300 pages long, quite a fast read. It came out about three years ago and one or two of his recipes for different ways of thinking about big projects have already become part of the language in the project world. There were two that stuck with me. One is ‘plan slow and act fast.’ What he means by that is along the lines of what we were saying earlier: Don’t start till you really know what you’re doing. It does take a surprisingly long time to really, really work out what a project is all about. If you try to skip that part, or rush it because of the pressure to be acting—to be buying land or digging holes or signing contracts—then you suffer in the long term. It’s a well-known project management saying: the sooner you start, the later you’ll finish. You need to devote the right amount of time to the planning in order that you can do a really fast job of the building, which is the expensive bit. The other is ‘think right to left.’ This is project management stuff. Normally, when you plan, you think, ‘What are we going to do first, and what will we do next?’ That’s left-to-right thinking. Right-to-left thinking is, ‘This is where we want to end up.’ You then go backwards to what you have to do first. There are dangers with right-to-left thinking—all of these truths have counter-truths to them: that’s the life of project management—but starting with the end in mind is really good advice. So it’s a good, quick read. It’s from an academic point of view, but not written in an academic way."

"This book is exceptionally interesting. Bent Flyvbjerg is an Oxford-based Danish academic. He is the main writer and it’s mainly based on his work, with Dan Gardner as co-author. Flyvbjerg’s work is to look at megaprojects and he poses a law of megaprojects: that they generally go over budget and over time and why this is bad. In the current circumstances, in the UK, there’s HS2, which Flyvbjerg has written about and talked about, but there are lots of great examples. He’s very fond of the Sydney Opera House debacle because it was a Danish architect who designed it. He points out that it essentially deprived the world of this architect’s future work because he was in such despair at the portrayal of the Sydney Opera House as a failure that he didn’t design anything much after that. There is a dictum in publishing that you don’t put the word ‘failure’ into your title because people find it depressing. But what’s great about reading about failure is the schadenfreude that readers can bring to it. This book is full of things going wrong that are great to read about. Not only Sydney Opera House-sized disasters, but also some slightly more recognisable ones. There’s a great account of a kitchen refurbishment – admittedly, a high-end one in New York – that went disastrously wrong. They draw a lot of personal lessons from this that make this book a really interesting read."