How Big Things Get Done
Bringing something from an idea to reality is an art. Notes from reading "How Big Things Get Done" by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner.
Steve Jobs is one of my idols. Not only mine but probably amongst most of the people interested in engineering & technology. Since he joined Apple in 1997, the company’s fortunes have transformed. Envisioning new ideas to disrupt multiple industries, like music, smartphones, tablets, and animation, is no mean feat.
However, as I have gained work experience and understood more of the effort required to get things done, I now feel people who limit Steve Jobs to just a visionary do him a disservice. Many people can be visionary - create a great slide deck, generate great ideas, and tell a great story. People like Steve Jobs are rare because they can imagine transformative products or solutions and bring them to reality in line with their imagination while keeping them commercially successful.
Steve Jobs’s greatness is not that he imagined the iPod but that he brought the iPod to reality as he imagined, with a fantastic user experience (I love his famous quote that “design is not how it feels but design is how it works”) and setting the commercial terms that disrupted the music industry. The iPod was not the first digital music player; it was the best designed & best executed. The same goes for the iPhone & the iPad.
Elon Musk is the same. Imagining an electric supercar (Tesla Roadster), bringing it to reality and making it commercially successful is terrific. The same goes for imagining a reusable rocket to space, being persistent in bringing it to reality, resulting in SpaceX eating market share from Boeing & Lockheed Martin.
Getting things done is an Art; very few people can do it!
No brainer, I was hooked when I came across “How Big Things Get Done” by Bent Flyvbjerg & Dan Gardner. I completed it over the Christmas holidays. It is an excellent book to understand what works for a successful project and the frameworks we can use to be successful in execution.
I decided to write down some of the insights from the book to share and also for me to come back & reference it. I hate making notes.
Think Slow, Act Fast - Take your time thinking about the project and trying to plan every minute detail. Keep the execution window as small as possible to avoid the black swan events.
The Commitment Fallacy - Avoid premature lock-in on the decision. The less reversible a decision is, the longer it takes until the last moment to decide. As Daniel Kahneman famously articulated - WYSIATI - What you see is all there is. We make decisions based only on the information at hand. Consider the goals, alternatives, difficulties, risks & solutions carefully before committing.
Another of Daniel Kahneman’s terms that’s important is “The Sunk Cost Fallacy.’’ While executing the project, it can go over budget. To decide to continue with the project, understand that the money poured in so far is gone (sunk cost) & cannot be recovered. Invest more only if continuing with the project makes sense now.
(Thinking Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahneman is one of my favourite books. I highly recommend it to everyone to understand ourselves, our biases & psychology in real-world scenarios).
Think Right to Left - Understand the Why. As Steve Jobs said - ‘‘you have to start from the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.’’ Having a clear understanding of the project’s goal and never losing sight of the goal at various execution steps is the foundation of any successful project.
Maximum Virtual Product - Plan well and simulate it end to end. Get feedback & iterate. Iteration allows people to experiment, allows processes to run end-to-end virtually, and is cheap. Create the Maximum Virtual Product before committing.
Experience counts - Experience counts even if it is expensive. Avoid first, biggest, tallest, longest & fastest when you can - technologies are untested, and people are not experienced. A lack of experience can easily make a project fat-tailed and exorbitantly expensive. So, pay for experience upfront to execute the project within the deadline & budget.
Reference Class Forecasting (RCF) - To forecast the timeline & budget for a project, try to get reference class data & put the first anchor on the mean. Reference class project data includes costs due to unknown unknowns, so instead of planning what is known, anchor it at the mean of historical data.
If you enjoy getting things done within the deadline & budget, I highly recommend the book to get some frameworks for better execution.
Great book.