Why most megaprojects go off the rails

A study of megaprojects over the last 30 years finds that 99.5 percent of them fail on budget, timeliness and the delivery of promised benefits.

Professor Bent Flyvbjerg from Oxford University and journalist Dan Gardner looked at hundreds of projects to find out why - and terrible planning was at the root of most mega projects going off the rails, they found.

“I think most people figure that the record is bad, because we all know the headline examples, but the record is actually much worse than you think,” Dan Gardner tells Jesse Mulligan.

They have published a book called How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, From Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything in Between. 

So, what's behind that abysmal record? Superficial and rushed planning, Gardner says.

“Failed projects typically start fast and then they get bogged down and then they go slow. So, what we're recommending is to reverse this process, to basically approach it from the perspective of saying, we have to do slow, careful, excellent planning first before we even talk about delivery.

“And you might think that's kind of common sense. Make haste slowly was actually a slogan of one of the Roman emperors so this is old advice.

“And yet, it's seldom done. When you look at successful projects, you will find it done, but it is seldom done.”

There are any number of reasons why projects are rushed into, he says.  

“If you want to lowball a bid, then quick and superficial planning is useful for you. If you're a politician who just wants to get the project underway and protect it so it doesn't get the plug pulled on it, well you want to get it underway right away and spend as much money as quickly as possible so that once enough money has been spent your successor will find it impossible to pull the plug.”

Business culture often sees slow, meticulous planning as a form of malingering, he says.

“If you treat planning that way, you will plan badly, and your project will go bad.”

Movie company Pixar is a rare of example of getting it right, he says. Pixar’s planning process for each film is meticulous. From numerous re-writes, to producing rough cut after rough cut of the proposed film for audience testing before the actual production starts.

“They will go through as many as eight or nine iterations before they finally say; ‘we have a plan, let's put it into production.’

“What that does is it surfaces all possible conceivable foreseeable problems and finds solutions for them before you even start the work itself.

“And so, when they go into production, the production is smooth and swift because their planning is superb.”

During Covid, the New Zealand government was anxious to fund so-called shovel ready projects, but such projects simply don’t exist Gardner says.

“In almost every case in which people are saying yes, this project is shovel ready give us the money, it's not shovel ready.

“If you have a high standard for planning, if you want a plan that is detailed, rigorous and reliable, it takes iterative planning, it's an experiential process.

“You have to try ideas, you have to simulate them, you have to see what happens. You have to iterate, iterate, iterate, that takes a lot of time and effort.”

An example of such a careful, iterative approach is Frank Gehry, the Canadian-American architect, he says.

“Frank Gehry, through long, long experience has figured out what he needs in order to achieve a successful project. To deliver it on budget, on time and to the client’s specifications. And if those elements aren't present, he will say no thank you and walk away.”

Gehry was an early adopter of digital simulation, Gardner says.

“He's designing buildings in this digital format to a level of precision that is absolutely exquisite. And what that allows him to do is experiment with ideas; if I tweak this then what are the implications for other factors in the building, because there's an infinite number of details that can be affected by any particular change.

“And so, he sees what happens and then he changes his plan accordingly, and then he will iterate, iterate, iterate, iterate on this digital simulation, in order to achieve a plan, which is highly reliable, and he's been able to do that with an amazing track record.”

Gehry’s spectacular Guggenheim museum in Bilbao came in $US3 million under budget and on time, he says. The equally iconic Sydney Opera House, however, was more an example of what not to do.

“The history of the Sydney Opera House was basically a disaster. It was so poorly planned.

“The conception of the architect was genius. It's an incredibly beautiful building. But the planning, through no fault of the architect, the planning was absolutely disastrous.

“And as a result, the Sydney Opera House ended up going 1600 percent over budget, just absolutely spectacular.”

It ruined the career of architect Jorn Utson, he says.

“His reputation was damaged to such an extent that he was never given significant commissions again.”

To avoid massive mistakes such as this, work from right to left, Gardner says.

“It's faulty human decision making which causes the failures, it's getting the human decision-making right that causes the successes. And that's true of the giant projects. But it's also true of projects all the way down the scale right to your kitchen renovation.”

Start with a clear idea of what the project aims to achieve, he says. In any project large or small there is a flowchart of work that starts on the left and progresses to the finish on the right.

“The box on the right is where you put what we hope to achieve. And you have to have a serious, thoughtful, informed discussion in order to fill in that box on the right at the very start of the project.

“Once you have that, for all the rest of the project, all through planning and all through delivery, when things are getting difficult problems are happening, things are getting complicated you've constantly got a North Star that you can look to; does this contribute to us getting to that final box? If it doesn't, throw it out. If it does, you do it. It really helps clarify the management of the project.”