The Scent of Inevitable Failure
The smell of stale coffee and expensive cologne always lingers in the briefing room, a scent that now reminds me of inevitable failure. I watched the Minister adjust his tie-a silk piece that probably cost $188-as he stepped toward the 48 microphones waiting to amplify his delusion. He was about to announce the ‘Trans-Northern Corridor,’ a rail project he claimed would cost exactly $8 billion and be finished within 8 years. In the back row, I checked the twitch in my left eyelid. I’d spent the morning googling ‘persistent eyelid tremors and neurological fatigue,’ convinced I was dying of some obscure supply chain-induced stress disorder, but the data on the screen was a different kind of terminal. Every analyst in the room, myself included, knew that rail projects of this scale almost never cost what the shiny brochures say they do. We weren’t looking at a plan; we were looking at a collective hallucination.
The Tyranny of the ‘Inside View’
We treat our projects as unique snowflakes rather than members of a predictable class of events. My own history is littered with these errors. Back in 2008, I managed a logistics overhaul that I swore would take 28 days. It took 58. I ignored the symptoms of a broken system because I was too busy staring at the idealized version of the outcome. We are all, at some level, addicted to the ‘Inside View.’
When we take the Inside View, we focus on the specific hurdles ahead of us. We plan for the tunnel, the labor strike, the fluctuating price of steel. We create elaborate Gantt charts that feel scientific because they have 88 different color-coded lines. But these charts are essentially works of fiction. To get it right, one must adopt the ‘Outside View,’ which asks a brutal, simple question: ‘How long did it take everyone else?’
“If 18 other nations tried this and took twice as long, why are we special? The answer is almost always: we aren’t.”
The System of Systemic Lies
I remember sitting in a warehouse in 1998, watching a shipment of 388 crates of industrial parts sit idle because of a customs technicality I hadn’t modeled. There is a perverse incentive structure at play. If a project manager tells the truth-that the bridge will actually cost double and take a decade-the project never gets funded. So, we lie. We lie to the public, we lie to the stakeholders, and most dangerously, we lie to ourselves.
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The cost of a lie is rarely paid by the person who told it.
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This is strategic misrepresentation: the intentional underestimation of costs to get a project approved. We’ve built an entire global economy on the foundation of these two errors working in tandem. We are perpetually surprised by things that are statistically certain to happen.
Economy Built on Optimism
91% Funded by Projections
Grounding Ambition in Data
To break this cycle, we have to move away from the ‘visionary’ at the podium and toward the technician with the database. This is why the shift toward predictive modeling and historical benchmarking is the only way forward. Organizations are finally starting to realize that their internal intuition is a liability. By leveraging tools like
Kairos, project planners can finally ground their ambitions in the reality of what has actually occurred in the past, rather than what they wish would happen in the future.
Intuition vs. Historical Fact
Ignores Class Data
Leverages History
If we can’t look at the data of the 1,088 projects that came before us, we are doomed to repeat their 1,088 mistakes.
The Sincerity of Disaster
I think back to that Minister. He wasn’t a bad person. He likely believed his $8 billion figure. That’s the most terrifying part of optimism bias-it’s sincere. It’s not a mustache-twirling villain trying to steal gold; it’s a well-meaning leader who is biologically incapable of seeing the disaster he’s inviting. My eyelid twitched again as he finished his speech. I had 28 tabs open on my phone, ranging from ‘symptoms of chronic stress’ to ‘average cost overruns in European rail.’ The data was screaming, but the applause in the room was louder.
There’s a specific kind of grief in knowing the ending of a story while everyone else is still enjoying the prologue. In my line of work, you become a Cassandra, cursed to see the supply chain collapse 18 months before the first vessel is even delayed.
They told me I was being ‘pessimistic’ and that I needed to be a ‘team player.’ The expansion eventually stalled, costing them $48 million in liquidated damages. It’s exhausting being the only one in the room who trusts the numbers more than the narrative.
We trade truth for the comfort of a deadline we can’t keep.
Building Systems Against Ego
The infrastructure of our civilization is currently a series of over-budget monuments to our own ego. It requires a radical vulnerability. It requires a politician to stand at that same podium and say, ‘This will be difficult, it will be expensive, and based on 388 similar projects, there is an 88% chance we will hit an unforeseen obstacle.’ That person would never get elected, which is perhaps the greatest tragedy of our time.
You can’t take a vitamin for a systemic refusal to acknowledge reality. You have to build systems that force the reality upon you. As I left the briefing, the sun was setting over the city, casting long shadows across the 8-lane highway. I wondered how many people stuck in that traffic believed they’d be home in 28 minutes. Probably all of them. And probably not a single one of them was right.