Dan Gardner

The world’s largest database on major projects — with over 16,000 projects in more than 20 different project categories — revealed that fewer than half of projects (47.9%) finish on budget. Fewer than one in ten (8.5%) are completed on budget and on time. And a nearly invisible 0.5% of all projects are completed on budget, on time, and with the expected benefits. Worse, projects aren’t merely at risk of being a little off. Catastrophic failure is frighteningly common. Even home renovations can easily come in three or four times over budget. And the story is the same around the world.

If projects are so important, why are we so bad at them? In this talk, I draw on the book How Big Things Get Done to look at why failure is so common and why a rare few projects are triumphs. The mind-expanding lessons about how we conceive, plan, and deliver major projects apply to projects of every imaginable variety, at every scale, from home renovations to space exploration.