Bent Flyvbjerg can point back to how his career began with a bridge that didn’t go to plan. The Great Belt Link, joining two halves of Denmark across a stretch of water that had kept them apart for centuries, cost 17 (seventeen!) times more than anything the country had built before, and it ran into trouble more or less on contact. What caught his attention was not so much the overrun. Big projects do that. What caught his attention was that when he went looking for the data to explain why they overrun, there wasn’t much of it. People don’t really like keeping scores of their failings, so Bent started collecting them, and the database he opened that day now holds more than 24,000 projects. It makes him something close to the only person who can tell you, with a straight face and the spreadsheet, how likely your tunnel/power station/railway/hospital is to cause a big hole in your finances, or political credibility.
One of the rules of thumb in his book with Dan Gardner (a Canadian, he was quick to point out) is “think slow, act fast”. It has the ring of a self-help or leadership airport paperback, however it is actually robust advice for building any major project. Acting fast is a privilege reserved for teams who have first taken the time to work through the idea, implications and desired outcomes slowly. That time affords the ability to develop understanding and competence, testing things out through simulation and experimentation.
