cf #97: escape the 99.5% law of planning doom
(and join the 0.5% excellence club)
You are reading contentfolks—a monthly(ish) blend of sticky notes, big content ideas, and small practical examples. Thank you for being here! ~fio
Hey there 👋
Today we’re not talking about brand, marketing, or content. Instead, we’re taking a semi-densely footnoted deep dive into project management…
…and yes, I am aware that the distant sound I’m hearing is thousands of people yawning in my general direction! But stay with me: in this age of AI delegation, tight budgets, and proving the ROI of everything (including yourself), leading projects and doing it well is becoming a must-do, regardless of your role.
I promise I’ll make it fun. I’ll even teleport us down to Sydney, Australia for a bit.
The iron law of project management
Earlier this year, after moving to a Brand & Marketing Lead role at Float, I thought it’d be a good idea to (re)read a bunch of texts about excellence in project leadership and delivery. Sometime in June, I stumbled upon this:
This chart is based on a database of 16,000+ projects from 20+ fields in 136 countries, and it tells us that:
Less than half of projects make it on budget
Only 8.5% make it on budget and time
Only 0.5% make it on budget and time and benefits
Kind of depressing when you think about it, and it also makes failure look inevitable, like: why even bother?1
But you can read it differently. Failure is widespread, so it has been amply documented—which also means that escaping the 99.5% law of doom is possible, as long as you avoid known fallacies and follow successful heuristics.
A masterpiece (of failure)
To see how projects can go disastrously over budget, over time, and under benefits, we need a short trip to the other side of the world (for me, at least). Meet me here:
Ah, the Sydney Opera House. A “masterpiece of 20th century architecture,” a world-famous building with “unparalleled design and construction…”2 and also, from the point of view of planning and delivery, an epic disaster:
Delivered 10 years late, 250% over time
Went 1400% over budget, from 7million AUD to the final 102
Unsuited to most live music3
Yikes. Here’s an extremely oversimplified story of what happened. In 1957, Danish architect Jørn Utzon won an international design competition to build a dedicated opera house in Sydney, with a set of preliminary sketches like this:
Without consulting structural engineers, he didn’t even know if the proposed roof could be built. Still, the Government of New South Wales commissioned him to finalise drawings for the Opera House and supervise its construction.
Two years later, Utzon still hadn’t solved the roof, but Premier and key stakeholder Joseph Cahill was pushing to start before funding and public opinion soured. So between 1959 and 1963, the foundations and podium went up. But then, in an Alanis-style twist, Utzon finally figured out the roof design—and it turned out those freshly built foundations would be too weak to hold it. Everything that had been built up to that point had to be blown up with dynamite. And on like this it went, for a whole other decade.
Biases and fallacies to look out for
The Sydney Opera House is a good example of a project that goes wrong. But you could equally argue that it didn’t go wrong so much as it started wrong, with a partial plan and a rushed execution, and failure became inevitable.
There were also major biases and fallacies involved—and these are so fundamental to how our brains are wired that they will likely show up in any projects you or I lead. Look out for them:
The optimism bias: the tendency to be overly optimistic about outcomes. This has obviously been great in human history to inspire big visions and make them happen; but when left unchecked, it “leads to unrealistic forecasts, poorly defined goals, better options ignored, problems not spotted and dealt with, and no contingencies to counteract the inevitable surprises.”4
The planning fallacy: a subset of optimism bias, in which we plan and “make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than on a rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities.”5 We overestimate benefits and gains and underestimate the time and costs it takes to deliver them.
The sunk cost fallacy: this is the classic ‘well, I have already spent time and/or money into it, so I may just as well keep going’ trap that makes us reluctant to abandon something because of how much we have already invested in it.
Strategic misrepresentation: this is where a project leader knows an estimate is unrealistic but pushes it anyway, “driven by the desire to get the plan approved […and] supported by the knowledge that projects are rarely abandoned unfinished merely because of overruns in costs or completion times.”6
Aren’t we a fun species!
When you blend these biases and layer them on top of a partial plan and a rushed start, you don’t just get the Opera House: you get why 99.5% of projects end up over time, over budget, and under benefit.
How to join the 0.5% club
So back to our initial goal of being the 0.5%. For this, I’m going to borrow a few heuristics from Prof. Bent Flyvbjerg—one of the most cited scholars of project leadership and mega projects, and also one of the answers to the question “which celebrity would fio invite to a dinner party?”7
His heuristics for project success translate well to our work in brand, content, and marketing, and here are three that stand out:
1. Ask why
Flyvbjerg’s research shows that the foundation of project success is “developing a clear, informed understanding of what the goal is and why—and never losing sight of it from beginning to end.”8
⚡️What this means for you → to clarify direction and justify investment, ask yourself, your team, or clients the following:
Why are we doing this? What’s the overall goal?
Does this align with/contribute to larger company goals? If yes, how? If no, why not?
Why this project and not another?
Why this format and not another?
Have we explored alternative ways to get the same result?
What (anec)data justifies the investment?
2. Say no and walk away
Related to the above, this is the (underrated) understanding that just because something can be done, doesn’t mean it should. “Staying focused is essential for getting projects done. Saying no is essential for staying focused.”9
⚡️What this means for you → strategic work is both about what you do and what you do not do—and these questions can help you make the right choice:
What’s leadership appetite for this? (if low: walk away)
Do we have the people, resources, and contingencies to succeed? (if no: walk away)
What’s the opportunity cost?
To do this, what are we not doing?
3. Think slow, act fast
Flyvbjerg’s research stresses the importance of careful thinking, exploring options, getting feedback, testing and iterating upfront, before moving decisively to delivery.
⚡️What this means for you → it’s tempting to rush to execution, especially when under pressure or in an org that rewards a bias for action; but time invested early usually pays off with faster (and smoother) delivery later. Ask:
Are we aligned in our assumptions?
What are effort and trade-off estimates based on?
Have we planned backwards from the end? Do we know our milestones?
Have we run a pre-mortem to anticipate and mitigate risks?
Are we leaving unknowns for later?
The more we ask these questions, the closer we’ll get to that ideal number of 0.5% of projects delivered on time, budget, and benefit.
…and when we join the 0.5% club, I sure hope Prof. Flyvbjerg at least sends us a commemorative t-shirt!
It gets worse: “Most project types are not only at risk of coming in late, going over budget, and generating fewer benefits than expected. They are at risk of going disastrously wrong. That means you may not wind up 10 percent over budget; you may go 100 percent over. Or 400 percent. Or worse.” How Big Things Get Done, 155.
Flyvbjerg and Gardner, How Big Things Get Done, 28.
Lovallo and Kahneman, Delusions of Success (Harvard Business Review).
Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, 250. This phenomenon is also called the Machiavelli factor, because the end (eg. get a project approved) justifies the means (eg. make the project look better than it is). Unlike the previous biases, which are involuntary by definition, this one is deliberate which makes it kinda evil and not something I recommend.
What? He is a celebrity—just in a niche and nerdy field! Over the last two decades, Flyvbjerg has built a database of 16,000+ mega projects, consulted for major companies and governments, and produced the infamous 99.5% data point we started from.
Flyvbjerg and Gardner, How Big Things Get Done, 51.
Flyvbjerg and Gardner, How Big Things Get Done, 189.
Just wanted to say how much I appreciated the excellent footnotes and referencing!
Your readings are interesting, what is the name of the book you are quoting?