I’m here, I'm here! Sorry I'm late, I couldn't find my keys,
and then there was loads of traffic, and my phone died...
[Sighs] Nightmare.
Ok, look.
The short version is: I didn’t allow enough time.
And we’ve all done that, right?
Which is weird, because these days we have more information at our fingertips
than ever before, and yet we still make bad time estimates. But... why?
In psychology, this is a recognised phenomenon
known as the planning fallacy,
in which predictions of time and resources required to complete tasks
are subject to an optimism bias,
and so consistently fall short of the reality.
I’ll give you an example.
I live pretty much exactly 100 miles from Heathrow airport.
The one road which covers most of that distance has a 70mph speed limit,
so that journey time is about 86 minutes.
Assume I need to be at the airport two hours before my 9am flight,
and I know I need to leave the house at 5:30am.
This, for better or worse, tends to be how we estimate:
figuring out the shortest time in which something is possible
and just... running with that figure.
But it’s pretty obvious that’s not a great system.
In this airport example,
my estimate has the potential to be disastrously inaccurate,
because it fails to account for any unknowns.
Roadworks, traffic, accidents, parking time,
needing a coffee before airport security at 7am.
Any one of those things could throw off my entire schedule.
Any two? I don’t stand a chance.
Now, leaving more time than you think you need isn’t some revolutionary life-hack.
We know it makes sense, we just consistently fail to do it.
It’s such a common behaviour that there’s even a word for those who embody it;
Tidsoptimist. Literally "time-optimist".
In our everyday lives this is mostly harmless, if a bit annoying.
But there are countless examples on much bigger scales,
with far more serious consequences.
Take the Sydney Opera House, which was originally intended to take
four years to build, at a cost of seven million dollars.
Due to a failure to fully understand
the complexities of such an ambitious piece of architecture,
actually ended up taking fourteen years, at a cost of more than 100 million dollars.
In hindsight, it’s easy to look at a project like this one
and criticise those involved
for not having a better grasp of what they were taking on.
But the truth is that they fell victim to a common paradox:
Estimates about a project are made before they start...
Which is when you know the least about that project.
This is where past experience comes into play
but that will only get you so far.
After all, the team building the Sydney Opera House probably wasn’t
a rag-tag bunch of cowboys, and they still ran into problems.
So how do you avoid this?
Some people live by the maxim “under-promise and over-deliver”,
sandbagging their estimates to give themselves more time than they need,
earning kudos when they deliver ahead of schedule.
But while extra time isn’t a bad idea,
doing this too much can blow up in your face.
In my experience, the best strategy is about realism and transparency,
but this isn’t without its challenges either.
The difficult thing about maintaining a sense of realism
is that our optimism bias is hard-wired
for both the bosses demanding estimates and for those doing the estimating.
If there had been two competing bids to build the Sydney Opera House,
one for 7 million dollars over four years, and one for 14 million over eight years,
which do you think would have won?
Yep. And that’s the problem.
We know that optimism, however unrealistic, is often rewarded,
so we revert to it, even when we know better.
The upshot is that focussing on realism and transparency
often means telling people what they don’t want to hear,
and risking being labelled a pessimist.
There’s no easy way around that,
but there is a quote I’ve always thought extremely relevant here:
“Reasonable people, equally informed, rarely disagree”.
As a realist, it’s your role to make sure that everyone is equally informed,
and this begins with identifying your unknowns.
If you can highlight the gaps in your knowledge about what lies ahead,
you can adjust your estimates
to allow some breathing room where you might need it.
Then you need to communicate these unknowns
so that everyone involved understands the potential bumps down the road.
Do this clearly and reasonably
and what might have been seen as a lack of optimism will be recognised as foresight.
But it’s not enough to just do this at the outset.
It’s important to maintain this transparency throughout the project,
especially if things aren’t going to plan.
One conversation about a project being a month late
is much better than 30 conversations about it being a day late.
Make no mistake - this isn’t the easy path,
but it is the right one.
No one enjoys difficult conversations, or risking being labelled as pessimistic,
but meeting these challenges with realism and transparency
is far more likely to yield the best long term results,
and it’s those results which will stand
as a testament to a project well managed.