Highlights from How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg, Dan Gardner
Highlights from this book
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MAKE HASTE—SLOWLY To understand the right way to get a project done quickly, it’s useful to think of a project as being divided into two phases. This is a simplification, but it works: first, planning; second, delivery. The terminology varies by industry—in movies, it’s “development and production”; in architecture, “design and construction”—but the basic idea is the same everywhere: Think first, then do. A project begins with a vision that is, at best, a vague image of the glorious thing the project will become. Planning is pushing the vision to the point where it is sufficiently researched, analyzed, tested, and detailed that we can be confident we have a reliable road map of the way forward.
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THE WINDOW OF DOOM The patterns I mentioned earlier, confirmed by my data, are strong clues: Projects that fail tend to drag on, while those that succeed zip along and finish. Why is that? Think of the duration of a project as an open window. The longer the duration, the more open the window. The more open the window, the more opportunity for something to crash through and cause trouble, including a big, bad black swan.
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Planning is a safe harbor. Delivery is venturing across the storm-tossed seas.
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If you feel the urge to commit—and you probably will—commit to completing that process before you draw conclusions about your big project.[39] At first, commit to having an open mind; that is, commit to not committing.
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In contrast, good planning explores, imagines, analyzes, tests, and iterates. That takes time. Thus, slow is a consequence of doing planning right, not a cause. The cause of good planning is the range and depth of the questions it asks and the imagination and the rigor of the answers it delivers.
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This simple distinction applies in most fields: Whatever can be done in planning should be, and planning should be slow and rigorously iterative, based on experiri.
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Use off-the-shelf technologies. Hire experienced people. Rely on the reliable. Don’t gamble if you can avoid it. Don’t be the first. Remove the words custom and bespoke from your vocabulary. They’re a desirable option for Italian tailoring if you can afford it, not for big projects.