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How Big Things Get Done
Flyvbjerg's 2023 popular synthesis (with Dan Gardner) of three decades of megaproject research — the mass-market distillation of the empirical findings on cost overruns, optimism bias, and strategic misrepresentation that established his scholarly reputation.
How Big Things Get Done, co-authored with journalist Dan Gardner and published by Currency in 2023, is Flyvbjerg's accessible synthesis of the empirical findings that had accumulated across his career of megaproject research. The book draws on the world's largest database of project outcomes — now exceeding sixteen thousand projects across dozens of countries and every major infrastructure category — to document the monotonous pattern: cost overruns average, benefits fall short, timelines stretch, and the pattern does not improve over time. The book translates three decades of technical research into reference-class-forecasting-as-consumer-advice, and it brought Flyvbjerg's diagnostic framework to an audience that had not previously engaged with infrastructure scholarship.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's core empirical finding has the force of diagnosis. Of the sixteen thousand projects in the database, only 0.5 percent came in on budget, on time, and delivered the promised benefits. The remaining 99.5 percent failed on at least one dimension, usually all
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