In an interview with Project Magazine, Bent Flyvbjerg describes the challenges, causes, and cures of risk in major project management. Main challenges identified are benefit shortfalls, cost overruns, and schedule overruns. Root causes of risk are argued to be optimism bias and strategic...

Recently, as I was concluding a study on megaprojects, I was made to think of Nobel Price winner F.A. Hayek's controversial article "Why the Worst Get on Top," about the selection of political leaders. Like Hayek's political leaders, we found it is not necessarily the best megaprojects that...

In terms of risk, many appraisals of very large infrastructure investments assume, or pretend to assume, that infrastructure policies and projects exist in a predictable Newtonian world of cause and effect where things go according to plan. In reality, the world of policy and project preparation...

In phronetic research the understanding of validity claims is hermeneutic, not objectivistic. Thus I relate validity claims to interpretation and I oppose the view that any one among a number of interpretations lacks value because it is “merely” an interpretation. The key point here is the...

Norwegian Abstract: I forbindelse med store transportinfrastrukturprosjekter viser det seg ofte å være store avvik mellom forventet og faktisk trafikkvolum. En menneskelig tendens til ønsketenkning kan være én årsak til de mange overdrevent positive trafikkprognosene. Og overoptimismen...

A major problem in the planning of mega-projects is the high level of misinformation about costs (and benefits) that decision-makers face in deciding whether to build and the high risks such misinformation generates. The inaccuracy of construction cost estimates is typically measured as the size...

It is useful to distinguish between “causes” and “root causes” in explaining cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and delays in major projects. Conventionally, the following are listed as causes of project underperformance in the literature: project complexity, scope changes, technological...

This chapter focuses on problems and their causes and cures in policy and planning for large-infrastructure projects. First, it identifies as the main problem in major infrastructure developments pervasive misinformation about the costs, benefits, and risks involved. A consequence of...

We identify and document a new principle of economic behavior: the principle of the Malevolent Hiding Hand. In a famous discussion, Albert Hirschman celebrated the Hiding Hand, which he saw as a benevolent mechanism by which unrealistically optimistic planners embark on unexpectedly challenging...

Reference Class Forecasting (RCF) is a method to remove optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation in cost and time to completion forecasting of projects and programmes. In September 2012, the Development Bureau of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region commissioned a...