Welcome to the IPM podcast. APM is the childhood body for
the project profession. My name is Emma DeVito, and I'm
the editor of project apm's coarsely journal and your host
today. I'm speaking again with bent
flew via. The first BT professor and
inaugural chair of major program management to the University of
Oxford Sayid business school, who has just published a new New
book together with journalists and Gardner, called how big
things get done. The surprising factors behind
every successful project from home renovations for science,
exploration published by MacMillan Avid podcast.
Listeners might remember, I spoke to Bent back in March, 20
21 about how to make your projects, a success in which he
spoke about reference class. Forecasting, one of the ways in
which to help ensure the realistic planning budgeting, as
setting of expected benefits for your projects, Been formulated
the iron law of Mega projects that contends that 1 billion
dollar plus mega-projects rail tunnels nuclear power stations
Olympic games were almost always blow their budget and schedule
and yield fewer benefits and promised his new book, outlines
how the data shows this is no mystery.
It's usually the result of terrible forecasting and
planning. The good news is that he
explains how every projects from a house renovation to the
building of a new nuclear power station can be done far more
More successfully, in fact, his approach which hinges on his
reference class, forecasting tool, will he hopes help us to
get to grips with the most critical mega-projects of all
the climate change. Emergency, we all face but
hello, welcome back to the Opium podcast.
So I'm delighted to have you back.
Thank you very much and thank you for having me again.
Let's get down to your book, How big things get done, the
surprising factors behind every successful, Checks from home,
renovations to space exploration.
First thing I wanted to congratulate you and such a
gripping read, which is not something I usually say about
most business books. Why did you want to write this
particular book when you did because they had to do something
during the pandemic. But I started thinking about it
before the pandemic and planning.
Its and the reason that I wanted to do it was that I wanted to do
something that was written in a more popular fashion, you know
where you Have to be an academic or a professional project
manager in order to understand what we were saying in the book,
but it was written in a language.
We are pretty much any person. Could pick it up and understand
what it was about and also understand that it actually
relates to their life. It's not just about these big
projects you hear about in the news like hs2 or a new
skyscraper somewhere in the world.
It's also about the products we do in our daily lives like you
know, Organizing a holiday or a wedding or doing a home.
Renovation is an example. We love and we use in the book.
So we also wanted to write about project management in the way
that it became clear to people that this is actually about your
life. It's not about something that is
happening, only in professional circles.
It's also happening in your daily life.
One of the messages that really stuck with me is the central
idea is think, slow act fast, could you explain to listeners
What this actually means and how it should be applied to
projects. The first thing I want to say is
that I think some people would rebel against things slow
because they think it means take a long time, and it doesn't
necessarily mean that it means that you need to slow down your
thinking in accordance with the findings, in behavioral
economics. So, you know, Daniel kahneman's
book called thinking fast and slow.
It's about. We have these two ways of
thinking and one is our spontaneous way that we use as a
fallback position. She's the fastest ways, we think
fast and that gets us into a lot of trouble.
So there's probably a good reason in evolutionary terms
that we have this ability to think really fast, you know, but
some things are not suited for that.
And I would say that a big project is the kind of thing
that is not suited for fast thinking that you actually need
to carefully, consider what you're doing.
Because the fact that it's big means that it has big
consequences, including on your own life.
It's one of your private projects, So the we basically
use the results from behavioral economics and Behavioral Science
and saying, okay this is a very, very well documented finding
that we actually need to think slow to be successful.
Behavioral economics, don't go further than that.
But we go further, we take the action side in because, of
course, that's important when you're doing projects, it's all
about action. There's no project isn't worth
much. If it's all just thinking or
words on paper, it needs to happen in reality and that's
Where the action comes in and we've started products very
carefully and and many people actually think the bigger the
project you do, the more risky and difficult it is.
And we find that's actually not, that's not the main problem,
there's a bit of Truth to that but not much actually, the main
thing is the longer. It takes the more risky it is
and the higher risk of going terribly wrong.
So it's actually time that is the killer for projects not size
and this is something thing that has never been documented before
that, it's actually about time and not size time is the killer.
So that's why we say egg fast. So by aging fast, you can
actually reduce your risks enormously, especially you have
been thinking slow for her. So that's why we say the rhythm
of success in projects is think slow act fast.
So when you say act fast and if you act slower, there's higher
risk. Can you spell out why that is?
Is it because you've got a greater window open to Events.
That might disrupt the project. Exactly.
That's that's the key the window and how big the window is and we
call it the window of Doom and that's very well founded.
I mean, this is based on heart research and because the bigger
you make the window, which means the the bigger you make the
period that you are delivering in the higher.
The risk is that something bad is going to fly through that
window and smash up your project, black swans, for
instance, to use the term that nesting Nicholas taleb has made
popular. That it actually turns out that
the risk of black swans derailing.
Your project goes up exponentially with the longer
the time you take. So it's very risky to take a
long time in terms of black swans.
And this is a very important, maybe the most important finding
in the book, in my own point of view is that the vast majority
of projects have fed Tails regarding performance.
So so products are Black Swan inclined.
That means that the best thing you can do to reduce Who's that
Black Swan risk and other risks to emphasize is to reduce that
window by keeping it short. And and we study successful
project leaders who are doing exactly.
That probably the most famous right now is Elon Musk.
You know, he's been extremely successful in his company.
So that's Tesla and SpaceX in using these principles that we
are describing in the book, like getting to production really
fast and, and thinking things, Through very carefully before
you start actually doing things and how do you square the
thinking slow with the current appetite for agile and iterative
thinking and just doing something and pivoting and
experimenting. So I want to distinguish between
two types of projects projects that are easily reversible,
where you can very easily. Reverse your decisions and
doesn't matter much, you know, whether you did something and
you have to redo it. And that's Agile is good for
situations where you can easily reverse your decisions and you
can get a learning process going and then you just you revise.
So this is common in software and that's where a child comes
from, right? But I don't mean to say that a
child should be limited to just software.
It's actually very useful method in lots of context.
But software is particularly suitable, because you're not
building anything physical, and it's very, it's quite easy to
change things. And that's why you talk about
me. Mum.
Viable products also in hii, right?
You just build a minimum viable product, your Market, put it to
Market your test it, and then you just take it back again and
you, and you fix things that don't work and you improve it,
then you send it out again and you go through iterations like
that. That's fine for products that
are easily reversible, but products that are not reversible
so irreversible projects, you can't do that.
So, for instance, if you're putting on a wedding, it's not a
good idea just to try a little wedding, you know, and then see
how it goes, and then you do another one, you know.
The same thing. Like if you're building a
skyscraper, how on Earth would you say?
Okay, we're going to put up a skyscraper, it doesn't work.
We take it down again and then we do another one, that would be
agile, right? Doesn't work.
So you have to make a very clear distinction between reversible
and irreversible decisions. Most big projects that actually
irreversible. Now, they don't have to be some
big software products can be built in an agile fashion and,
and some change management products can be done in an agile
versus where you're just changing organizational
structure. Sirs and organizational
processes and so on. And where it's not that big of a
deal, if you make a mistake and have to redo it.
But anything, you know, like you're building a tunnel under
the channel between the UK and France.
You can't just start boring and then say, okay, if start
working, will start pouring somewhere else.
Why does thinking slow and acting fast, not usually happen
because we are programmed to not do this, we are hard-wired from
nature from biology, for whatever reason.
Probably very good revolutionary regions.
We have something called availability bias.
That whatever pops into our brain first and makes itself
available as a thought. And this could be a thought
about a project or an idea for the project.
We tend to take on to that and then disregard all sorts of
other things. We actually kind of lose
perspective because we already have a prospective.
Namely, the first thought that came into our mind.
This is very well-documented again, in Behavioral Science and
behavioral economics, that we have this and this is something
to watch out for. And that's why we think fast, we
just It jumped to the first thing.
And then we assume that this is all there is Kahneman has the
word for he called it. We see a tea which is a terrible
acronym, but that's what he calls it it stands for what you
see is all there is. So what you see is all there is
that's an extremely strong, cognitive bias we have and and
can a man spends a large part of his book describing this and how
it trips us up. So that's what's happening in
projects is that we quickly. Let's go on to some idea.
Maybe even a specific technology technology that we're going to
use for this project and then that's all we see.
What we see is all there is and we run with ads instead of
instead of setting stepping back and saying, okay now I have one
idea now let me start to think about some other ideas and we
give very clear guidance in the book and and take the readers
hand and walk the reader through processes that you can use to
step back and think more systematically about what are
the Alternatives here? What are the many other ways
that we could do this? This and then decide, which of
these ways are you going to use? One of our main means is to ask
why we encourage anybody, who's doing a project to First, sit
down and ask themselves or whoever is doing this project,
why are you doing the project Y? And you need to have a very good
answer to that question before you start.
So, you actually know precisely and very well thought out what
the reasons are that Doing the project then after you know that
you can start thinking backwards from that.
That's the really the end product, you want to end up
with, then you work backwards through the against diagram and
to the left side of the diagram. And then you start thinking
about how do I deliver the why? And, and what's the best way to
do that? That's a way to avoid falling
into this trap of committing to a bad idea of front which is
very common. And if you do that, then you'll
get the opposite of thinking slow acting.
So fast. You get think fast X Lo because
you have, if you haven't thought out what you are going to do,
then all sorts of problems are going to pop up when you can
least afford it. And when it's really going to
slow you down which is in the delivery phase, I want to talk
to you about thinking, right to left.
So that connects with what you were saying.
Just then about, what is it? Why are you doing this project?
What do you hope the outcomes to be?
So thinking right to live is referring to the process.
Chart that is used in most project planning and management.
So the Gantt chart classically where you have the end result
the outcome on the rights and then everything that needs to
happen left of that. So you start all the way on the
left and then you eventually end up on the right.
We say reverse that process, start on the rights, then work
your way backwards to the lift and then you start delivery
while you keep your eyes on the right?
So, you know that at all times, that anything you do.
Do is contributing to what's on the right of the diagram.
And the right is established by the question, why, that's why
you ask the why question, why are we doing this?
What we're doing it? Because we want this, and that
this is your end results. So the why question helps you
put the right thing on the right side of the diagram?
And then, then you work backwards.
And the key thing here is that this helps you having, you know,
you, you're basically having a North star that will lead you
all the way through the project delivery process.
No matter. Complex it is and how much you
you you tend to get lost in the weeds from time to time.
If you look up and you look at what's out there on the right
you know where what you should be aiming for and then you just
look down and see is what I'm doing now.
Actually contributing to that outcome and if the answer is
yes, keep doing what you're doing.
If the answer is no, stop doing what you're doing and start
doing something that actually contributes to the outcome.
And very often people get lost in their projects, you know,
they lose their way. Way, because it's not clear.
What? What's in the, The Box on the
right of the process diagram, I was curious on your thoughts
about optimism. Optimism bias.
How you mitigate against that in a project?
Yes. Also, we are seeing that.
There are two big things that decide the fate of projects one
in Psychology. The other is power and the
optimism bias is psychology. So this is probably the most
well established its cognitive bias and the most research
cognitive bias that exists it again, very well documented that
we are hard-wired to be optimists.
And again, probably for good reason we needed to get up in
the morning and get to Work and take care of our kids and and do
projects and and nobody and certainly not me would deny
that. We need optimism in our lives
and we need optimism in project management and project delivery.
However, optimism can be misplaced, it can really get you
into bed situation. Like just imagine if you are
getting on a plane and you hear the first pilot saying to the
second pilot, I'm optimistic about the future.
Situation. I don't know about you, but I
don't want to be on that plane. I want to get off.
I don't want a pilot who's optimistic about the future
situation. I want the pilot whose they did
certain and realistic about the fuel situation.
Now, what's the fuel of products?
The fuel projects is money and time.
We need money and time to fuel our products to get to that box
on the right, you know, of the diagram.
And I don't want to work with project leaders that are To
Mystic about the budgets. I don't want to work with
project leaders that are optimistic about the schedule
because I know that if that's the case that we have a huge
risk of crashing just like the airplane would have if you
optimistic about the future situation.
Now I'm lucky. I get to work on a lot of
projects because a lot of product making this error and
then you know, once they made the error, I can hired into it
too. Deep is the project and get rid
of the optimism and and then see if we can, can we can we Salvage
the prop? The project can be re-baseline
it and then make sure we have a realistic schedule and a
realistic budget for for delivering, the rest of the
project successfully. And there are, you know, very
good ways of doing this and they're different ways.
So I've developed a method called reference class
forecasting, but they also something called similarity
based forecasting. They are, you know, where you
can, you can before you even start the You can try to imagine
everything that could go wrong with it and so that's called a
pre-mortem. You actually pick the project
apart before you start it and see.
Okay. If everything goes wrong what
could happen here and then you protect yourself against all
these things. So there are many ways you can,
you can deep is projects. It's called there's a common
term for this. Now, that is emerging Court
decision, hygiene. This is a kind of hygiene that
you need to do on your decisions, to make them sound,
you know, and healthy to make. A healthy decision.
You need to Citizen hygiene D biasing is part of decision.
Hygiene, we very much need that on Project.
How important is the well, the politics side of things and how
is the project manager or project leader to.
You prepare yourself as best, you can to deal with that side
of things. So we haven't.
And if you ristic about that and we call it, builds your Bridges
before you need them. It's too late to start
developing stakeholder relations, when you need the
stakeholders to help you, when things start going wrong with
your project, you need to have built those relations.
So those are the bridges that I'm talking about.
You need to build those bridges before you need them.
So that they are there when you need them and you can cross
them, you can, you can communicate with the
stakeholders and you can, you can ask them for help, you know,
to, to get the project back on track.
So that's that's the, the stakeholder management.
Part of things. And it's really important,
incredibly important. If we find that the many, many
successful project leaders that we have studied for the book
included, including interviewing them, but also studying their
work, you know, directly. They all do this one successful.
IT project manager who's managing multi-billion dollar
and multibillion-pound IT projects, you know, said that he
that when he's He's leading one of these shoot, I'll see
projects, he's spending more than half his time, on
stakeholder management. He's like a, he's like
diplomats, you know, out there trying to make sure that the
project has good relations with everybody and that's in his
view, that's what he needs. To spend his time on and then
he's bringing in people to do the more technical stuff and
actually running the project. He's just out there way in front
of the project, making sure that relations are good.
So that when they hit a bump in the road, They actually have the
relationship, they need in order to get over it.
So that's, that's the way you can call it, like you say,
managing politics because that's the sort of the micro politics
of the project is, what do the stakeholders think about the
project? Will they support it, or will
they be against it? That's very important for the
project leader, and the Project Lead.
It seemed to be aware of. Of course, there are many other
ways that politics can play a part.
So one way that we talk about in the book is the is the politics
of manipulating. The business case of France in
order to get it approved and that's another type of bias we
call it power buyers. So on one side we had such we
have psychology that we talked about and there you have the
cognitive bias is a which optimism bias is the most
prominent on the power side, you have people deliberately
manipulating things. So on the psychology size is non
deliberate, people actually not conscious of their own biases or
optimists are not conscious. Mostly not conscious, they're
optimistic when they're making. Decisions.
They actually think they're making realistic decisions when
they are making optimistic decisions with political and
Power Bars. It's different people actually
know what they're doing. They are manipulate that it's
called cooking. The numbers in the US they call
it cooking the number so you cook, you cook the books and you
cook, you cook the business case.
So that the project looks cheap, you know it's much easier to get
a project, proved that health and low budget and the same with
schedule, you cook the schedule so that it looks short.
It's much easier to get a project that proved that looks
like it can be delivered quickly.
So so that's that's power bias and it has exactly the same
effect as psychological bias except it's deliberate.
But these two buyers is the psychology psychological biases.
And the power buyers is actually reinforce each other and create
these very unhealthy business cases that we see for the vast
majority and I cannot emphasize enough.
How big that? Make sure it's your projects is
that him Bad Business cases. Well, if you're an experienced,
project manager project leader, do you become aware?
Do you think that you'd have this optimism bias at the more
projects you have under the belt?
The more you realize that actually you need to be somehow
turn your optimism dial down so it will it will keep happening
to some degree but successful product leaders, do get the
optimism bias and other buyers is under control, their
anchoring anchoring anchoring in the wrong base rates.
For instance, That's a classic, you know, that you totally
Estimate the risks. That's also a type of optimism,
right? And it's called the base rate
fallacy, and it's again a very well-established fallacy and
behavioral economics. And this is the kind of thing
that said, successful product leaders, get over these big
pitfalls, but that doesn't mean that nobody, I'm there.
Nobody's perfect regarding psychological bias.
It would basically mean that you would have to take your brain
out and put another brain in there because it's hot.
It's hot. It's truly hard wired for this.
You can get rid of I would say about I would say 50 to 70% of
your biases, if you are very, very good but but you will have
those 30 to 50 percent bias still, you know, and and
Kahneman argue something like the same in his book thinking
fast and slow and other Publications that that he did.
So I think that's again also a pretty solid thing but it
doesn't mean that it's not worth the biasing, it really is and
what I find with with really successful product leaders and
I've worked, I've been very fortunate.
We work with many for many, many years.
And, and some of them we interviewed for the book and new
ones, we interviewed for the book, and I find they all have
this really attractive disposition and their
personalities are being realistic optimists.
So they extremely rigid, they're really realistic about what are
the odds in the fields that we are playing in there.
Like, somebody going to the casino and totally understanding
the odds, not being optimistic about you win on the roulette,
you know, if you know what the real odds are But at the same
time having an optimistic can-do attitude.
You know of course we can find a way to get this project done.
If we have this realism at the outset we are not building a pie
in the sky we're building something real.
We know what the laws of physics are and the laws of Economics
Etc loss of organization. We abide by it.
All we think slow, we really think what we about what we're
doing. We iterate, as we call it in the
book. We experiment.
We do things over and over. And over and over again, in
order to learn before we start building in the real world, so
that we don't make the mistake that we mistakes that we do
during the experimentation on the ground.
Once we are building and it's expensive.
That's how the successful project leaders work and it's
really stimulating to see people working like that.
So I mean, one of the piece of advice in your book is that if
you're embarking on a project that you should try and find the
most experienced people to be on the team and to lead that
project, What is that? Not common place.
It doesn't happen that often it happens, but it doesn't happen
nearly often enough. Unfortunately, people don't
think enough about it. That's another of these, you
know, thinking fast things that hey, we have a leader here, he
or, she can probably do this project.
Let's get going, you know, and instead of spending the time of
thinking about what kind of need to do, we need here and we have
a heuristic for that to we call it higher and master builder.
So we call these very successful project leaders for Master
Builders and and the term comes from the Middle Ages, you know,
where you call the famous Architects and Builders who
built the cathedrals of Europe. So the famous Cathedrals that we
have and still admire today were built by people who really knew
what they were doing mostly and and, and they got the name
Master Builders. So we decided to use that name
for today, you know, in the Contemporary world, for people
who really good at delivering projects, no matter what, type
of products they don't have to be Cathedrals, you know, they
don't Have to be buildings. It can be like, we talked about
Master Builders at Pixar, for instance, to take an example.
So so that's what we call them and they are not being hired
enough. I was ours to give you an
example. I was an expert witness of on a
big hydroelectric, Dam in Canada, that had gone terribly
wrong. So, the usual pattern, huge cost
overruns, huge delays, not delivering what we were supposed
to deliver and not at the time, it was supposed to do it.
Etc. Etc.
So they decided to have, you know, an inquiry headed by
preeminent judge, you know, to really serious.
And with, you know, with the Firepower that you get, when you
can pull people in and question them, and people have to answer
and I was, I was an expert witness on that and it turned
out during the inquiry that People who were hired to build
the dam had never built a dam before.
Never can you imagine this is a multibillion-dollar,
hydroelectric Dam and you decide to choose somebody to printed
who's never built a dam before. And and now this is one thing
and it's okay. And this is actually what got me
started? Researching mega-projects was I
was thinking, is this normal? You have these crazy stories
like the one I just told you From from you know one off Mega
projects in different places around the world and I started
wondering is this normal? Is there a pattern here?
We had one in Denmark, that similarly went wrong for the
same reasons, actually. So what they did in Canada was
they figured, you know, it's actually difficult right now to
find somebody who can build a dam like this in Canada but we
are doing a lot of oil and gas projects.
So we had to have a lot of project leaders who are used to
building multi-billion dollar, oil, and gas products and
listen, you know how difficult can It be, if you know how to
build one, big project, you know, how to build another big
project. So that's highest hire somebody
from oil and gas and let them build the dam.
Now that's what I mean by this is not slow thinking that's for
sure, that's fast thinking, let's find a quick solution and
it costs billions of dollars. That's what happens you know
when you do it like that. So yeah, so it's a kind of
laziness of not wanting to go through the slow thinking and
really do everything you can to find the Master Builders.
But there's also a real problem and that is there's not enough
Talent around. So the world is building more
and more big projects at an incredible rate right now.
So we are just getting More and bigger projects across the
board, across the panel. So there's a lot of demand for
people who can do this. So they are not enough as simple
as that. They demand far outstrips the
supply of talent in this field. And that means you actually
might have to grow your own talent, but then you have to be
aware of it. You can't just assume that
whoever you hire can build the project if you have, if you are
hiring people who doesn't have the talent that you need for
building your product and that assumption is often made and
that's another heuristic we have don't assume Verify, and we find
that. You know, big products are
littered with assumption that that are wrong assumptions that
are wrong, you know, like one thing after another is assumed
and nobody bothers to spend the time to verify, whether it's
actually the case and therefore the products go wrong very
quickly with because they have built on wrong assumptions.
What advice would you give to project professionals who are
just starting out in their career, about what they need to
focus on what they need to do in order to manage their projects
successfully and to the government and to become
successful project leaders in the future.
So, first of all, it is a great time to be in the project
management and product leadership field because there's
a lot of demand and it's very easy to get a job.
And I also encourage my students, you know, it to choose
this field and and, of course, choose the areas that are going
up. So I actually have a lot of
students who are concerned about being in oil and gas or oil and
gas is a huge field in major product.
It's been around forever for decades and decades and decades.
And now, you know things are not right now.
They're going well because the prices of oil up again, but if
you sort of look at it at The last, the last 10 years and the
next 10, 20 years, it's probably not the field to be in and like
I tell my students, why do you want to be in an elevator that's
going down if you can be on one that's going up, you know?
And they are all the areas and it's it's easy to give jobs in
other areas. So that's one thing I would say
this is great feels to get into but to be concerned and think
about things slow about which of the many different areas.
Different project types that exist is that you actually want
to do and I will Right now I would advise against going into
oil and gas, I would advise against going into nuclear
unless you are on a team that's trying to develop SMR small
modular reactors which might have a future but we don't know.
Nucleus is very unproven technology incredibly as it's
incredible as it sounds because you've been doing nuclear for 50
years and at least and but it's still unproven and it doesn't
work. It's way too expensive.
That's just the effect of nuclear right now is Only
economics. Nothing ideological about
whether nucleus good or bad or dangerous, or not.
It's, it's about economics and it's too expensive.
It's that simple. So that's one thing.
Be careful about what you choose and then after that, you know,
if you are young and entering the field, make sure you get to
work on a project where you leaders are not.
The kind of people that I talked about in Canada.
They they are people who have never tried to build the project
before and they're doing it. That's not what you want to
learn. How to do you want to find a
master builder? And then you want to work with
that master builder and watch that master builder work.
So that you can that you can be a kind of a net princess or just
watch things and work on a team. You know, that really works
because it is well lit. That's the kind of team you want
to get on and not on the majority of teams that are
learning by making mistakes. You know, I mean, you have to
make some mistakes but it's much more efficient to be on a team
that is led by somebody who's successful.
So that's the The second thing I would do, if I was starting a
career now and that's what I advise my students to do.
Now, back to the thing about nuclear, So we started 25
different product types in the book regarding their performance
and nuclear comes out at the very bottom with it projects
actually. And with hydroelectric dams and
with storage some nuclear wastes, these are the worst
performing projects in terms of being Black Swan prone, meaning
that they have extreme outliers in regards, of course, and cost
overruns and schedule and schedule over on etcetera.
And they are difficult to manage and they end up being very
expensive. That's what we can do.
We can't afford it. And if we're going to solve the
climate crisis, if we if we right now, we're deciding to
focus on those projects. We wouldn't be able to do it in
time, 2030 and 2050, which are the timelines for solving, the
climate crisis, just would not be made.
So, you know, there was no way to do it, it's way too slow even
in China and so we have that, we have something that be called a
natural experiment in China where Anna has really tried to
ramp up all forms of power production that don't produce
CO2, and of course, nuclear is one of them and they just can't
ramp it up, it's too difficult. Even in China, where you don't
have the safety and environmental regulations that
you have in countries like the US and the UK and Europe.
The Chinese can't do it. And we take that to mean that
you just can't do it. It's not doable.
Nobody can do it right now. Luckily, this is actually Where
the focus is in solving the climate crisis, the focus is on
Renewables now and especially solar and and wind are the two
best performing products of the 25 product types.
That we studied they way out there in terms of good
performance, they are actually outliers that it's crazy.
But everage practice in product management is a disaster and
good practice, good practices and Outlier.
It's the exact opposite of what you usually say, when you talk
about these things. But it's a fact, you know, and
it's document in the book for the first time.
This is actually a brand new research result that we have is
comparing these 25, different product type, there's a nice
diagram, that, that shows it in in one overview, which products
are performing well and which are not.
And luckily, you know, the projects that we need in order
to solve the climate crisis are doing extremely well and they
perform really well. They are done really fast and we
also What the reason is, you know, for this, which is the
modularity is in it. Exactly.
So that's why, that's why I use the term Lego, so I'm Dana
Sande. Lego is is a Danish brand is
the, it's the biggest toy manufacturer in the world now
and with the test with the popularity of Lego and why are
they go so important? So, so popular, and an important
in kids lives, I grew up with him.
I remember stepping on them as a child and hurting my feet, you
know. No, all over our house and I
find that that no matter where I go in the world and talk about
Lego, people understand what it is and that's why I like to use
it as a metaphor for what it is. That works in project management
is exactly the process that you can build.
Like you build it with Legos and I'm saying the sound of a
successful product. It is click, click click.
It's like putting building blocks together like you put
Legos together. Click click click and if you
look at it look at what a wind Wind Farm is you know it's a
bunch of wind turbines and each wind turbine consists of Four
Legos. So there's one Lego that is the
foundation, there's one Lego that is the tower.
There's one Lego that is nestled which is where the where the
turbine itself is sitting and then they are the wings or the
blades you know that you Click on the cells so you click the
tile on the foundation to click the nacelle on the tower.
You click the the blades on the Nestle and you have a wind
turbine and it's actually ready to produce electricity
immediately. And these giant wind turbines
are put up in less than 24 hours now.
Multibillion-dollar wind farms used to take years to to do.
Now they're built in seven months, seven months for a
multi-billion dollar project is unheard of.
That's exactly what we need in order to solve the climate
crisis. And that's exactly thinking,
slow acting fast. You know, in a nutshell, how
optimistic do you feel about the way Mega projects or projects
are going to be delivered in the future?
Future developed Mystic that there will be greater success.
I'm pretty optimistic. I mean, this is one of the
things we discovered while doing the book that I find that
there's more reason to be optimistic than I thought there
was. And I was already pretty
optimistic, you know, because I mean, I've seen a lot of things
going well on the projects that I've been working on, and I'm
seeing that spreading, there's more and more interest.
They didn't used to be much interest about these things.
Now, there's massive interest, everything everywhere in the
world for the simple reason that we are doing.
So many and so large project like we talked about earlier.
So so yeah I'm optimistic and I'm especially optimistic about
the discovery that it's actually is already happening it.
It's amazing to see how fast Renewables are being built out
and I want to emphasize and people often think when I'm - or
nuclear, and I'm positive on Renewables that.
That's something ideological and political.
It's I'm an economic geographer. I'm looking on the at the
economics of this and this is pure Early based on the
economics, solar and wind are dirt cheap and they're getting
cheaper every year. Nuclear is incredibly expensive
and it's getting more and more expensive.
The more we try to build it because we can't figure out how
to build it right and how to build a cheap, you know, and
therefore the price is going up, well, any Economist who gets
that information? Will know that one of these
things is not going to work and the other is and it's very clear
which is which here and that's that's a very positive thing
that we are actually Lucky in the Even that we are in where
we're solving the energy crisis is probably the most pressing
problem that we have ever had as a species that we just happen to
have a technology that is spreading like wildfire right
now. Even the most optimistic
organizations like Greenpeace and and you know Green
organizations for wind and solar and so on.
Underestimated how fast it would develop that.
They actually thought it would take much longer than it has
done even to this date, you know?
And, and instead of taking a generation to do it, it has
taken like 19 years to get to where we thought it would take a
generation. So what we thought would take 25
years as has taken nine to ten years.
So that's a really good reason to be optimistic and that's Just
Energy. There's there are lots of other
reasons to be optimistic in other areas.
Thank you so much. I think we've really gotta cross
what your book is about. So I would recommend this to get
their hands on a copy how big things get done, and that's
happened. I'm out now by in McMillan, so
thank you again for your time. It was it's been a lovely
speaking to you. My pleasure.
Thank you for having me again. Thanks again to vent for joining
us and to you for listening to this episode of the APM
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