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| <title>How Big Things Get Done - Bent Flyvbjerg - Book Notes</title> | ||
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| <a href="./" id="home">Book Notes</a> | ||
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| <div id="title"> | ||
| <h1>How Big Things Get Done - Bent Flyvbjerg</h1> | ||
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| <div id="content"> | ||
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| <ul> | ||
| <li> | ||
| <p>Gems</p> | ||
| <ul> | ||
| <li>"You want the flight attendant, not the pilot, to be an optimist. What you need from your pilot, | ||
| and must insist on, is hard-nosed analysis that sees reality as clearly as possible."</li> | ||
| <li>"Repetition is the genius of modularity; it enables experimentation."</li> | ||
| </ul> | ||
| </li> | ||
| <li> | ||
| <p>Intro</p> | ||
| <ul> | ||
| <li>"The Empire State designers were inspired to imagine their process as a vertical assembly line | ||
| — except that 'the assembly line did the moving,' Shreve explained, while 'the finished product | ||
| stayed in place.'"</li> | ||
| <li>The Empire State building was designed fully on paper before construction began. They knew | ||
| precisely how many beams and other materials they needed.</li> | ||
| </ul> | ||
| </li> | ||
| <li> | ||
| <p>Think slow, act fast (chap 1)</p> | ||
| <ul> | ||
| <li>Big projects generate "blizzards of numbers" for each stage. When doing a post-project | ||
| retrospective on what went wrong, it's hard to get an accurate picture. And there's usually | ||
| spin, because people's reputations are at stake.</li> | ||
| <li>"The actual mean cost over-run of a major building project is 62 percent."</li> | ||
| <li>The cost overrun of a big project follows a fat tailed distribution, not a normal distribution. | ||
| This is because big projects are complex interdependent systems.</li> | ||
| <li>Home builders and remodelers can't reliably estimate the project's cost. The fat tail overages | ||
| due to complex system effects are too difficult to handle.</li> | ||
| <li>Bent suggests "closing the window" by completing the project quickly, so that it's exposed to | ||
| fewer changes in dynamics or black swan events that occur during construction. In other words, | ||
| risk builds over time until the project is done, so stretching out the timeline is likely to | ||
| incur unforeseen costs.</li> | ||
| <li>Argues for a waterfall approach. Robust, slow planning, because iteration during planning is | ||
| cheap. Costs explode once you enter building construction or film production.</li> | ||
| <li>"Projects don't go wrong, they start wrong."</li> | ||
| <li>Big transportation projects often break ground with only a vision in place, not a comprehensive | ||
| plan with all blockers resolved.</li> | ||
| <li>"People run around trying to fix things. More stuff breaks. There is more running around. I call | ||
| this the 'break-fix-cycle.' A project that enters it is like a mammoth stuck in a tar pit."</li> | ||
| </ul> | ||
| </li> | ||
| <li> | ||
| <p>The commitment fallacy (chap 2)</p> | ||
| <ul> | ||
| <li>"Tattoos, marriages, big projects: In every case, we know we really should think it through | ||
| carefully, so why do we so often fail to do so?"</li> | ||
| <li>Strategic misrepresentation: superficial planning which glosses over major challenges, wins the | ||
| contract, and then surfaces the cost overruns once the buyer is deeply committed.</li> | ||
| <li>"You want the flight attendant, not the pilot, to be an optimist. What you need from your pilot, | ||
| and must insist on, is hard-nosed analysis that sees reality as clearly as possible."</li> | ||
| <li>Type I decision making — fast, intuitive — comes naturally to us, but does not work well for | ||
| big projects. The iceberg of missing information is too big.</li> | ||
| <li>Planning fallacy / Hofstadter's law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take | ||
| into account Hofstadter's Law." | ||
| <ul> | ||
| <li>People tend to use their best case scenario as the average case.</li> | ||
| </ul> | ||
| </li> | ||
| <li>Action bias does not work well for big projects, because the decisions aren't often reversible, | ||
| as they are in business.</li> | ||
| <li>Reframe planning work to be the highest quality action: "Planning <em>is</em> working on the project. | ||
| Progress in planning <em>is</em> progress on the project, often the most cost-effective progress you | ||
| can achieve."</li> | ||
| <li>Escalation of commitment | ||
| <ul> | ||
| <li>This strategy is to spend money quickly through a lot of action, so the sponsor becomes | ||
| committed. They can't back out or they would lose their investment, and lose face. "Start | ||
| digging a hole."</li> | ||
| <li>People cannot remove sunk costs from their decision making about the next phase of the | ||
| project.</li> | ||
| <li>Even if politicians understand the sunk-cost fallacy, they press on, because the public will | ||
| likely be swayed by sunk costs.</li> | ||
| </ul> | ||
| </li> | ||
| <li>On building the Pentagon: | ||
| <ul> | ||
| <li>"Somervell was also steeped in a 'can-do' army engineering culture that prized System One | ||
| decisiveness and getting stuff done above all else."</li> | ||
| </ul> | ||
| </li> | ||
| </ul> | ||
| </li> | ||
| <li> | ||
| <p>Think from right to left (chap 3)</p> | ||
| <ul> | ||
| <li>Meaning, start with the end in mind and work backwards.</li> | ||
| <li>A slow planning process is not necessarily helpful; only if the slowness is a byproduct of | ||
| depth, rigor, and imagination in exploring alternatives and second-order effects.</li> | ||
| <li>"Questioning isn't doubting or criticizing, much less attacking or tearing down." Rather, it's | ||
| being curious. When embarking on a project, assume there must be more to learn.</li> | ||
| <li>Ask "why" about the goals of the client and the goal for the project, and understand them | ||
| thoroughly before shifting one's thinking to the means.</li> | ||
| </ul> | ||
| </li> | ||
| <li> | ||
| <p>Pixar planning (chap 4)</p> | ||
| <ul> | ||
| <li>To get a detailed and reliable plan, one must gather information, run simulations and | ||
| experiments to discover unknowns and derisk the project.</li> | ||
| <li>The Sydney Opera House is considered by many to be the most beautiful and important architecture | ||
| work of the last century. Its construction was a fiasco. The Sydney official rushed it into | ||
| production before his retirement, before it had any substantial planning, so that he could leave | ||
| behind a legacy.</li> | ||
| <li>Guggenheim Bilbao was designed and tested for structural engineering feasibility on a computer, | ||
| before entering construction. The simulation was the real building's "digital twin."</li> | ||
| <li>Pixar does extensive paper prototyping of films before entering production. Storyboards for the | ||
| whole movie are made, recorded in video, shown to employees and the brain trust, and iterated | ||
| many times. It takes years of this low-fidelity simulation to get it right.</li> | ||
| <li>"By the time you see the film, it's the ninth version of the movie that we've put up." - Peter | ||
| Doctor</li> | ||
| <li>Iteration provides the freedom to try things out. With one-shot production, you must avoid risks | ||
| by sticking to what's safe and most likely to work.</li> | ||
| <li>The author compares his advice to Lean Startup. Both prioritize cheaply testing and derisking | ||
| the plan through iteration. Minimize the cycle time.</li> | ||
| </ul> | ||
| </li> | ||
| <li> | ||
| <p>Are you experienced? (chap 5)</p> | ||
| <ul> | ||
| <li>Bent argues that experience is paramount for big projects, but it's routinely deprioritized when | ||
| assembling the team. People want the money and jobs from the big project, and will lobby to be | ||
| the ones to execute the project. | ||
| <ul> | ||
| <li>E.g. hiring domestic contractors rather than more experienced foreign ones.</li> | ||
| </ul> | ||
| </li> | ||
| <li>Government project planners don't visit other countries to learn how they accomplished a similar | ||
| project. The knowledge is siloed.</li> | ||
| <li>"Drawing on data from five hundred brands in fifty product categories, they found that almost | ||
| half of pioneers failed, compared to 8 percent of settlers." | ||
| <ul> | ||
| <li>The first-mover advantage in big projects isn't clear. Being a pioneer may be glorious, but it | ||
| puts the project at risk because you have no one else's experience to learn from.</li> | ||
| </ul> | ||
| </li> | ||
| <li>It's not just people that become experienced, but equipment and techniques. Using experienced, proven | ||
| tech reduces risk.</li> | ||
| <li>"Technology is 'frozen experience.'" | ||
| <ul> | ||
| <li>In tech we assume new is better, but the new option is inherently inexperienced.</li> | ||
| </ul> | ||
| </li> | ||
| <li>Experienced people have tacit knowledge that is easy to undervalue, because it's tacit. | ||
| <ul> | ||
| <li>"We can know more than we can tell."</li> | ||
| </ul> | ||
| </li> | ||
| </ul> | ||
| </li> | ||
| <li> | ||
| <p>So you think your project is unique? (chap 6)</p> | ||
| <ul> | ||
| <li>Estimates usually proceed from some anchor value. But then no one asks if the anchor is | ||
| reasonable for the project. Sometimes the team is even unaware that their estimate is anchored | ||
| to another value. It's probably best to dismiss the initial anchor entirely, and proceed | ||
| strictly from first principles.</li> | ||
| <li>Constructing the Sydney Opera House was a unique project. But it's ultimately an opera house and | ||
| there is much to learn from other opera house projects.</li> | ||
| <li>Reference class forecasting | ||
| <ul> | ||
| <li>Consider a project as part of a class; another "one of those." E.g. the class of all opera | ||
| houses.</li> | ||
| <li>Produce a top-down estimate by comparing it to its historical predecessors.</li> | ||
| <li>This is an "outside view" which helpfully factors in the impact of historical unknown | ||
| unknowns.</li> | ||
| </ul> | ||
| </li> | ||
| <li>This outside view is meant to combat "uniqueness bias." Uniqueness bias is an attempt to adjust | ||
| a project's estimate up or down from the category's mean based on vague assertions of how this | ||
| project is different from the rest.</li> | ||
| <li>Old project data is hard to come by. Planning teams have no reason to save it. | ||
| <ul> | ||
| <li>"Project planners and managers have a mindset that is focused on the future, not the past."</li> | ||
| <li>To get it, call people who have done similar projects and get their estimates.</li> | ||
| </ul> | ||
| </li> | ||
| <li>His approach to managing black swans: review all very delayed projects of the past, enumerate | ||
| the reasons for the delays, and come up with mitigations for each. E.g. put hundreds of | ||
| archaeologists on retainer so a big tunnel dig doesn't get blocked if you encounter artifacts | ||
| that need to be excavated.</li> | ||
| </ul> | ||
| </li> | ||
| <li> | ||
| <p>Can ignorance be your friend? (chap 7)</p> | ||
| <ul> | ||
| <li>Bent makes the case about how one can only reason about the value of planning from data — a | ||
| large number of case studies — rather than from anecdotes, especially successful ones, because | ||
| they suffer from survivorship bias.</li> | ||
| <li>About The Pixar Way: "When stakes and stress are low, we are freer to wonder, try, and | ||
| experiment. Planning is creativity's natural habitat."</li> | ||
| </ul> | ||
| </li> | ||
| <li> | ||
| <p>What's your lego? (chap 9)</p> | ||
| <ul> | ||
| <li>Modularity: build huge things by building many small things. You get many reps and can master | ||
| the process of building the Lego. E.g. building many individual solar panels eventually yields | ||
| low cost solar panel arrays.</li> | ||
| <li>Iteration is possible, whereas it's not in one-shot projects.</li> | ||
| <li>If you build one huge thing, like a nuclear or hydro plant, you only get one rep, and it's one | ||
| of a kind, so the learnings don't transfer easily to future reps.</li> | ||
| <li>"Repetition is the genius of modularity; it enables experimentation."</li> | ||
| <li>Modularity cuts tail risk.</li> | ||
| <li>"Manufacturing in a factory and assembling on-site is far more efficient than traditional | ||
| construction because a factory is a controlled environment designed to be as efficient, linear, | ||
| and predictable as possible." There is no weather or site-specific difficulties.</li> | ||
| <li>Examples | ||
| <ul> | ||
| <li>Rather than damming a whole river, divert some of it and build a small hydro-electric unit; | ||
| repeat.</li> | ||
| <li>The Giga Factory in Nevada is built from 21 smaller factories, and each one of those is able to | ||
| produce stuff once it is built.</li> | ||
| <li>Shipping containers turned cargo transport into a Lego.</li> | ||
| <li>Small modular reactors (SMR) for nuclear power plants.</li> | ||
| </ul> | ||
| </li> | ||
| <li>"Modularization does more than [reduce costs]; it radically reduces risk."</li> | ||
| <li>(Great table plotting big project types — nuclear, solar, tunneling, mining, rail, olympics — | ||
| and their fat vs. thin tail risk.)</li> | ||
| <li>(A case study about how quickly and successfully we've learned to scale up wind farms.)</li> | ||
| </ul> | ||
| </li> | ||
| </ul> | ||
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| <footer> | ||
| <hr></hr> | ||
| All content on this page, including text excerpts, is copyrighted by the author of the book. | ||
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