Få store ting gjort

What do we actually know about why so many of the really big projects - mega-projects - go wrong? A great deal, in fact, thanks to professor Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. Fortunately, they have chosen to write an excellent and entertaining book about it, based on +16,000 projects in 136 countries on every continent except Antarctica.

Få store ting gjort features a number of highly recognisable cases from both the really big construction projects - such as the Empire State Building (which was finished ahead of schedule and built in just over a year), the Guggenheim in Bilbao and the opera house in Sydney. But also from small projects, such as renovations of our own houses, which face the same challenges, just on a smaller scale.

A couple of the main conclusions are that, of all the projects examined, only 48% keep to budget, 8.5% also keep to time, and 0.5% also deliver the desired results. This is partly because projects do not go wrong - they start wrong, because we fail to think slowly in order to be able to act quickly.

The book examines both pitfalls and fallacies in the form of our psychological biases, which have an enormous bearing on the choices made in all kinds of projects and changes.