Oxford economist Bent Flyvbjerg is an expert in the planning of “megaprojects,” huge efforts that require at least $1 billion of investment: bridges, tunnels, office towers, airports, telescopes, the Olympics. He’s spent decades studying the many ways megaprojects go wrong and the few ways to get them right. His new book How Big Things Get Done, is summarized in The Wall Street Journal (Feb. 4-5, 2023).

Spoiler alert! Big things get done very badly. They cost too much. They take too long. They fall too short of expectations too often. This is what Flyvbjerg calls the Iron Law of Megaprojects: “over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over again.”

His work can be distilled into three pitiful numbers:

• 47.9% are delivered on budget. 
• 8.5% are delivered on budget and on time. 
• 0.5% are delivered on budget, on time and with the projected benefits.

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa Spain is a rare example of proper project planning

Flyvbjerg found that the complexity, novelty and difficulty of megaprojects heighten their risk and leave them vulnerable to extreme outcomes.  “You shouldn’t expect that they will go bad,” he says. “You should expect that quite a large percentage will go disastrously bad. Despite the fact that trillions of dollars had been spent around the world on such projects, nobody knew if they stayed on schedule or budget.”