Bcg Henderson Institute

Bent Flyvbjerg has a sobering statistic to share: 99.5% of major projects fail to deliver their targeted results on time and on budget. His new book How Big Things Get Done, coauthored with Dan Gardner, explores this phenomenon—from infrastructure projects to major sporting events to corporate transformations.Flyvbjerg, the first BT Professor of Major Programme Management at Oxford’s Saïd Business School and VKR Professor of Major Program Management at the IT University of Copenhagen, is the world’s foremost expert on megaproject management—a subject on which he has published prolifically.He recently joined Martin Reeves, Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, to discuss the patterns and drivers of the failure of big projects, as well as potential solutions that can help executives overcome these dramatic odds. For example, cognitive biases, particularly at the C-suite level, cause leaders to act too spontaneously—when they would be better off acting fast only after first thinking slowly and