The hidden bias that ruins Most projects

Welcome to Success Factors Discovery, your weekly email connecting you to moments of inspiration. Enjoy delivering highly successful projects.

This week’s focus: why thinking your project is unique might be your biggest mistake.

Most project professionals have been trained to believe that every project is “unique.”

The world's biggest project association the PMI defines projects as being "unique". The UK Government and most textbooks do the same.

But what if that single idea, the one baked into pretty much every definition of “project” is completely wrong?

What if thinking in this way increase your likelihood of an "extreme" cost blow out by 34%.

Would it matter if there was a quick and simple thing you could do about it?

Why it's BANANAS

If your project were truly unique, it would have nothing in common with any other project.

Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

We can immediately see this is wrong and we have a problem. This word "unique" is how most trained PM's are taught to think.

This is not a small thing.

Nobel Prize winning behavioural science and a recent research by Oxford University tells us that the way you and I think about projects is the same.

The Effect UNIQUENESS bias

Oxford University recently tested this in a global study of 219 IT projects ranging from $77,000 to $4.5 billion.

Each team rated how unique they thought their project was, from 1 (not unique) to 10 (completely unique).

Then the researchers compared those perceptions to performance.

I find the results astonishing:

• Projects that saw themselves as highly unique (above 7) overspent by 45 percentage points more on average.
• Those that believed they were truly unique (10) were 37% more likely to experience an extreme cost overrun.
• 1 in 5 project teams rated themselves above 7 on the “uniqueness” scale a statistically significant liability.
• "A one-point increase on the ten-point Likert scale associates with, on average, a five percentage point increase in cost overrun

This is what Bent Flyvbjerg and his team call the “uniqueness bias.”

The Implication

It's almost certain that you, like I, under-estimate the risk of our project and think they are more unique then they are.

It's the word "Perceive" that's really key from their research.

Therefore, it's almost certain we are seeing cost blowouts, stress, and missing opportunities to look good.

📆 Tuesday Action:
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Recognise Your Project Is Not Unique
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Really simple things you can do immediately:
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1. Drop the word “unique” from your project vocabulary, banish it.
2. On your projects, find someone who has done it before. Fire out an email or social media message. Ask:

• "How long did you think the project would take vs. actual?"
• "What went wrong?"
• And a good closing question: "What would you do if you were me?"

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​Do:

• Find people who have done bits of your projects in similar ways before.
• Cast your net wide, avoid being too narrow in your categories.

​

Don't:
​Ignore examples of catastrophic events, avoid this human tendency, use this as your "worst case" planning scenario.

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Advanced Techniques:

1. Reference class forecasting
2. Similarity based forecasting
3. Noise audits
4. Pre-mortems

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Human decision making unfortunately stinks in many ways, no thanks to our human bias laden approach to decision making.

So, wash those stinky decisions and apply some 'decision hygiene',

If in doubt, use this mantra "I should assume that the project has been done before"

Until next Tuesday.

Greg

P.S. If you want help applying this, check out Step 2.1: Recognise Your Project Is Not Unique in the 12 Steps Playbook. [here]

p.p.s a graph from Oxford's research.