How big things get done

Megaprojects: temporary endeavours (i.e. projects) characterised by: large investment commitment, vast complexity (especially in organisational terms), and long-lasting impact on the economy, the environment, and society.

Megaprojects built the world. We had the first farming communities 10,000 years ago. 5,000 years later, the Great Pyramid of Giza was built. Today, we’re sending humans to mars and spacecraft out of the solar system, and we’re building artificial intelligence that might soon surpass all human capabilities.

How these projects perform has a huge impact on the world, and in some cases, on the future of our species. It’s imperative we improve our ability to strategically identify the need for megaprojects, design them so they generate large societal benefits and minimal harms, and deliver them on time and within budget.

The good

Here are two examples of how amazing humans can be, when we work together effectively towards a positive mission.

The Eiffel Tower

The Paris Olympics are underway, so I’ll start with the Eiffel Tower. It was built in two years and two months, from 1887 to 1889, by <500 people for ~£30M in today’s money. Upon completion, it became the world’s tallest building.

It’s one of the most famous buildings in the world, and is visited by 7M people each year. There are also replicas in Las Vegas and China!

TSMC Fabs

Semiconductor manufacturing is probably the most complex manufacturing process in the world. I wrote a post about it here. It takes place in a semiconductor chip fabrication plant, known as a Fab. TSMC built the most advanced fab in the world (Fab 18) for ~$20B. The chips cost $500M just to design, then TSMC mass-manufactures them with atomic-level precision. They’re essential for every major industry in the world.

The bad

Yes, humanity often does amazing things. However, we’re not immune to blunders, and we have a lot to learn before we can solve all the world’s biggest problems, and create a flourishing future for everyone. Here are some fiascos we can learn from.

Rio de Janeiro 2016 Olympics

The olympics have a terrible track record of going over budget and providing fewer benefits to the host country than anticipated. The Rio de Janeiro 2016 Olympics is one of the worst-performers. Their initial budget was $3B, but by the completion of the games, their costs had skyrocketed by 4x to $13B. While the games led to an increase in tourism during 2016, most of the infrastructure that was built for the games has fallen into disrepair. The economic benefits are dwarfed by the immense costs incurred by the local population.

Berlin Brandenburg Airport

In January 2024, I visited a friend in Berlin, and landed in Berlin Brandenburg Airport. I was dumbfounded by how inefficient the experience was. After landing, hundreds of passengers were crammed into a small space, waiting to have our passports processed. It took ages to get through passport control, and once I was out of the airport, I had no idea how to go from the airport to Berlin. The signage was terrible, and I had to ask multiple strangers and members of staff to figure out what was going on. Google maps was oblivious as to how I was meant to navigate the many layers of the airport.

After sharing my experience with a friend, I learnt that this airport was a national scandal. It was badly designed, opened 9 years late, and had gone over budget by 3x, costing over €7B. It’s now a popular case study of megaproject failures.

Sydney Opera House

Imagine you’re a politician in Sydney, Australia, in the 1950s. Your health is on the decline, you might lose the next election, and you want to establish your legacy. You decide to push for a grand new building that will put Sydney on the global stage, and there’s no time to lose. You succeed in convincing the public and other politicians to invest a huge amount of money into a new opera house, and the design contest has been won by an unknown and inexperienced Danish architect. You can’t wait for the designs to be finished, so you encourage construction to begin. This is how the Sydney Opera House started its life.

Local politicians were incentivised to underestimate the costs and construction timeline, while overstating the expected benefits. They wanted to start the construction phase as quickly as possible, to make it harder for future politicians to stop the project, and they were worried the public would turn against them.

The idea for the shells was revolutionary, and as a result, nobody knew how to build them. They had to make major engineering breakthroughs in order to turn the initial design into reality. Early construction work had to be demolished, as the foundations weren’t strong enough for the final designs of the shells.

There was an election, and due to tensions between the architect and the newly elected official, the lead architect left the project.

The Sydney Opera House was completed 10 years late and went 1,350% over budget. The lead architect, Jørn Utzon, left in disgrace, and never saw the building he envisioned almost 20 years earlier.

What are some reasons why megaprojects fail?

There are many reasons why megaprojects fail, but here I’ll highlight some of the major themes from the book “How Big Things Get Done”.

Impatience leads to mistakes and pivots

We often hear people commend the idea of being “fast” or operating “at pace”. However, if you start pouring concrete foundations for an unfinished building, or you start digging tunnels before you’ve finished the design (looking at you Big Dig), you’re asking for trouble. This often happens due to impatience, external pressures to see “results”, or to generate inertia so no one can stop the project.

Once you’ve started the expensive phase of a project (e.g. construction in a building project, animating and marketing a film in the entertainment business), mistakes or pivots become very expensive. You might discover that your bridge shakes violently in the wind, and you have to spend millions making it safe. You might discover that your movie’s plot is flawed, leading you to scrap half the scenes that have already been filmed. You might discover that nobody wants to use the app you’ve spent 6 months developing in your bedroom.

These mistakes will send you “back to the drawing board”. However, you’ve now contracted thousands of construction workers, or you’ve got a film crew and fancy actors ready to shoot the next scene. You’ll feel immense pressure to find a “quick fix” so these people can get going again. Your quick fix leads to more problems. Years later, the project is finally finished, but nobody is proud of the final result. Your project is over budget, late, and doesn’t meet its promised benefits.

Start with why

Instead of rushing to pour concrete or build a complex app, start by thinking really hard about this basic question: Why?

You should have a very clear understanding of why you’re here at all. What is it you’re trying to achieve? What problem are you trying to solve? What do you want to be different in the world? Only after you have invested the cognitive effort to gain clarity on this should you start ideating on how to achieve the desired outcome.

Learn when it’s cheap

Your first idea is probably bad. You should generate lots of ideas for how to achieve the desired goal, prioritise the best ideas, build cheap versions of them, get lots of feedback, and improve and iterate many times on the cheap versions. Once you’ve tested your idea and you’re confident you’ve got the makings of something great, move to the next stage.

Before you start a time-consuming and expensive phase, you should have thoroughly tested and improved a mockup or simulation of the final product. You should know exactly what needs to be done, and you should feel confident you won’t need to make any major pivots.

For example, if you happen to be building a musical instrument that’s played by marbles, create cardboard cutouts of the instrument before starting to build it. Use the cardboard cutouts to visualise what it might look like on stage, and what it would be like to play. Make CAD drawings of each component, and design a working virtual version of the machine, to identify design flaws before you start welding metal together. You want to avoid spending 4 years building a machine that doesn’t work! (I encourage you to watch all 4 of the videos on the marble machine, from left to right! What a journey)

If you’re producing an animated film, write a high-level storyline (get feedback, iterate, improve, etc.), then write a script, then create a storyboard, and only once you’ve got an excellent storyboard do you consider starting the expensive and time-consuming animation stage.

Make accurate predictions

You press the ON button on your TV, and a news anchor is interviewing a politician. The politician says “this project will be amazing! It will be completed in 3 years, and will only cost £50M.” Do you believe them?

When proposing a big project, those who stand to gain from it are incentivised to overstate the project’s benefits, and understate the costs and timelines. They want to convince people to get on board, secure funding, and prevent opposition. Their predictions are going to be way off.

To make an accurate prediction of the project’s expected costs, benefits and timelines, try doing reference-class forecasting. This is where you try to understand what category (reference-class) your project is in, e.g. “building a tall, thin skyscraper in New York” or “launching a vegan fine-dining restaurant in London”, and gather data of lots of examples of other projects in that category. You want to graph out the costs of historical projects in that category, how long they took to complete, and the resulting benefits. If everything follows a normal distribution, and you think your project is basically the same as the other projects, then you can assume that your expected costs, timeline and benefits are the average of the examples you’ve found!

Your project is less unique than you think it is. There are always projects you can learn from, that help you ground your predictions. Don’t make up a deadline for your team out of thin air, and then run around telling potential investors you’re going to solve world hunger in the next 2 years with your new iPhone app.

Once you’re going, get moving!

The Eiffel Tower was built in 2 years, and the Empire State Building was built in 1.5 years. They’re both icons. The Berlin Brandenburg Airport took 14 years, and is a national embarrassment.

Once you start the expensive phase of your project, you want to move as quickly as possible.

You want to avoid running payroll for 1,000s of staff for the next few decades! Being slow is expensive, as a result of ongoing staff costs, paying money to rent equipment or land, and increases the delay between starting your investment and making a return.

Being slow can also be very disruptive for the people affected by your project! The Big Dig caused immense disruption to the residents of Boston during the 15 years of construction, generating a huge amount of noise and air pollution, disrupting traffic, and decreasing revenues for local businesses.

You’re also vulnerable to unexpected events during this phase of the project. Extreme weather events, a global pandemic, financial disasters, political turmoil, etc. could stop your project in its tracks, and once a huge project has stopped, it’s difficult and expensive to get it going again. You might lose key employees, your financial or political backing might fizzle away, or the public might turn against you. Reduce your project’s window of vulnerbility by speeding through the delivery/build phase!

How do you move fast?

First, you should know where you’re going! Don’t start before you know what the destination is, and everyone on your team is aligned with that direction. You should also have tested many cheaper versions/mockups/simulations of your designs before proceeding with the expensive “build” phase. Finally, consider building lots of small things instead of one big thing.

Here’s a list of “one big thing” projects: the Olympic Games, nuclear power plants, high-speed rail.

Here’s a list of “many small things” projects: consumer electronics, solar panels, wind turbines, factory-made houses, the Eiffel Tower’s metal pieces.

Before continuing to read, try to come up with a few examples of “one big thing” and “many small projects” yourself.

When you build lots of small, fast and reproducible things, you provide yourself with many opportunities to learn. You can improve the design, manufacturing and delivery of the product with every unit, and your team will become experts in their domains. You want your team to be a well-oiled machine!

You can also isolate the consequences of an error to a single unit. If one unit breaks, it doesn’t destroy the entire batch. And you can start to generate revenue much sooner, without having to complete the rollout of all the units. Each unit can provide value in isolation.

Also, don’t chase shiny objects: use boring technology. If you want to build something huge that’s on time and on budget, use well-refined technologies and methods so you can minimise risky assumptions and find experienced staff. I recommend you read Project Hail Mary so you can enjoy Eva Stratt commanding everyone to save the world using only boring technology!

When you’re building a big, slow, bespoke thing, the learnings you gain on how to do that thing don’t transfer well to your next project. After 10 years of construction, your team might know how to build this type of nuclear power plant in this specific way, but once you move to the next power plant, the science and engineering has improved so the designs have all changed, and your team needs to climb up the learning ladder again, with all the costly mistakes which that entails. You’re afflicted with eternal beginner syndrome.

Concluding

Making the world better for humanity will require many enormous projects. But making big things happen is really hard, megaprojects have a terrible track record, and it’s easy to get swept up in the excitement of a new idea. To increase the likelihood of success, consider following these guidelines:

• Think hard

  • Start with asking yourself why, and work backwards from your end goal.

  • Create mockups / simulations / prototypes of your initial ideas, test them, get lots of feedback, and iterate. Make mistakes and learn when it’s cheap.

  • Do reference-class forecasting to get a realistic estimate for the expected costs, timeline and benefits.

• Act fast

  • Once you’re making big moves, move quick! Big moves are expensive and disruptive.

  • Minimise the duration of time where your project is vulnerable to unexpected events.

  • Scale in a smart way by building lots of small reproducible things, instead of one big bespoke thing.