The Planning Fallacy

Blame the Book Club at work - one of the books we were to read was "Thinking Fast and Slow". It's hard going and I am still ploughing through it !

Then someone posted, somewhere, a link to an article about Hofstdter's Law

"any task you're planning to complete will always take longer than expected - even when Hofstadter's law is taken into account. "

and just after that, I got to the section of the book that covers the planning fallacy. The author tells a tale of a group of people (including him) who were working on developing a new course. After a period of work during which they had defined what they wanted to do and completed two chapters of the associated supporting text, they had a conversation about how long they thought it would take them to complete the work. There was a range of answers, from 18 months to 2.5 years.

Among the group was someone who regularly did this sort of work and - after having given his estimate (which also fell within the range of answers), he got asked "how long do other people take to do this kind of work ?" and "as a group how do we compare to the average ?"

It turns out that a signficant number of groups NEVER complete the work, but for those who do - it takes around 8 years on average.

And the group doing this particular piece of work were all fairly new to it, so were probably below average.

Hmmmm.... so their own estimate not only assumes they will finish, when there is a fairly high likelihood they won't, but it also assumes they will work three times faster than the norm when they are an inexperienced group !

In the end they did complete, and in around 7 years.

I carried on reading the book, and came across another concept that struck me as potentially useful. The premortem basically uses "prospective hindsight" to look at what might make the project/activity fail, and then look for solutions. That may sound familiar as it is the same kind of thing that we are trying to do when we run Risk Workshops. What I thought might help us is the way of framing the work i.e. to brief people to "imagine one year in the future, we implemented the plan and it was a disaster" and then work through every reason why it did fail.

While this may seem like a negative mindset, it is purely an exercise and intended to prevent that disaster from happening.

And while I'm on the subject (well sort of), here is a link someone shared on cognitive bias and this one too - The Flaw of Expected Values