Protecting Your Projects from Cognitive Bias
Imagine it’s 1990, and West and East Germany are doing the previously unthinkable: reunification is good and well on its way. To bring the city together, there is talk of a single, unified airport for both Berlins. Sixteen years later, building begins and a prospective opening date is set for fall 2011.
Then it is postponed for June 2012.
But four weeks before the rescheduled opening, the building does not pass its safety inspection. The opening is pushed back until summer 2013, then to early 2014. By 2014, it is projected that the opening will be in 2017. As the original budget is surpassed by €5 billion1 and companies depending on the airport file for bankruptcy due to delays, Berliners and Germans alike become habituated to the never-ending public works blunder known as the BER airport.
By 2019, we came to believe that the airport would never open and that the never-used terminal would be demolished. There were rumours that it had been built with no light switches,2 that the roof was 2x too heavy for the structure,3 and that the planner was just a student. Some of this is likely untrue, but it engages a feeling of schadenfreude, defying the “always perfect” stereotype of German engineering.
This story might be a fun anecdote for your next (virtual) cocktail party. But it also highlights a very real problem: projects almost never go as planned. And Berlin is not alone: just google “planning delay” from your own city and you are likely to find a similar example.
This leads us to the very unsurprising conclusion that despite extensive experience with project planning, things often don’t go as planned. Projects start off with a group of highly talented and optimistic people, but budgets inevitably run over and timelines are extended.
That poses a question: Do delays have to be inevitable or is it possible to prevent these delays from happening in the future?
That’s where agile software development comes in. The agile methodology is a form of project management that rose out of software development in the early 2000s and is now applied by a wide variety of teams and departments (e.g. agile HR, agile product development, and so on). Many of the tenants of agile are validated by decades of scientific research coming out of the field of cognitive psychology and behavioural economics.4
References
- Smith, O. (2018, January 9). Whatever happened to German efficiency? Berlin’s new airport is a contender for the world’s most useless. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/berlin-new-airport-delayed-again/
- Sullivan, A. (2017, December 15). Berlin’s new airport: A potted history. Deutsche Welle. https://www.dw.com/en/berlins-new-airport-a-potted-history/a-41813465
- Haines, G. (2017, June 1). The farcical saga of Berlin’s new airport – whatever happened to German efficiency? The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/the-crazy-saga-of-berlins-long-delayed-airport/
- Samson, A. (2020, April 22). An introduction to behavioral economics. The BE Hub. https://www.behavioraleconomics.com/resources/introduction-behavioral-economics/
- Behavioural Insights Team. (2017). A review of optimism bias, planning fallacy, sunk cost bias and groupthink in project delivery and organisational decision making, accompanying an exploration of behavioural biases in project delivery at the department for transport. https://www.bi.team/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Lit-Review-exploration-of-behavioural-biases-in-DfT-PD_July_2017.pdf
- Yong, E. (2015, November 9). Can a futures market save science? The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/11/gambling-on-the-reliability-on-science-literally/414834/
- Roese, N. J. (2012, September 6). ‘I knew it all along…Didn’t I?’ – Understanding hindsight bias. Association for Psychological Science – APS. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/i-knew-it-all-along-didnt-i-understanding-hindsight-bias.html
- Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1982). Intuitive prediction: Biases and corrective procedures. Judgment under Uncertainty, 414-421. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511809477.031
- Buehler, R., Griffin, D., & Ross, M. (1994). Exploring the “planning fallacy”: Why people underestimate their task completion times. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 366-381. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.67.3.366
- Clark, D. (2017, October 23). Simple ways to spot unknown unknowns. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2017/10/simple-ways-to-spot-unknown-unknowns
- BIT Blog. (2017, August 15). Keeping projects on track: Overcoming cognitive biases in project planning and delivery. The Behavioural Insights Team. https://www.bi.team/blogs/keeping-projects-on-track-overcoming-cognitive-biases-in-project-planning-and-delivery/
- Principles behind the Agile manifesto. (n.d.). Manifesto for Agile Software Development. https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
- Radigan, D. (n.d.). Standups for Agile teams. Atlassian. https://www.atlassian.com/agile/scrum/standups
- Behavioural Economics & Research Team, & Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government. (2018, June). Nudge vs Superbugs. Australian Government. https://www1.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/1598E371849EEA83CA2582B000062D9C/$File/Nudge%20vs%20Superbugs%20-%20A%20behavioural%20economics%20trial%20to%20reduce%20the%20overprescribing%20of%20antibiotics%20June%202018.pdf
- Mitchell, D. J., Edward Russo, J., & Pennington, N. (1989). Back to the future: Temporal perspective in the explanation of events. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 2(1), 25-38. https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.3960020103
- Forsyth, D. K., & Burt, C. D. (2008). Allocating time to future tasks: The effect of task segmentation on planning fallacy bias. Memory & Cognition, 36(4), 791-798. https://doi.org/10.3758/mc.36.4.791
- Farr, L. (2018, June 22). Groupthink. Islip Public Library. https://www.isliplibrary.org/groupthink/
- Red teaming and alternative analysis. (n.d.). Red Team Journal. https://redteamjournal.com/red-teaming-and-alternative-analysis/
- Im Flughafen regnet es rein. (2020, November 3). Berliner Morgenpost. https://www.morgenpost.de/flughafen-BER/article230828184/Im-Flughafen-BER-regnet-es-rein.html
About the Author
Natasha Hawryluk
Natasha is a consultant in change management and organization design. During her psychology undergrad, Natasha assisted in a fMRI lab and intercultural communication lab at the University of Alberta. Natasha's psychology background and exposure to behavioral science during graduate school influenced her to continue to engage her passion for understanding human behavior even in her industry-facing career. Natasha lives in Berlin,Germany where she completed her MBA ('18).
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