Monday, September 17, 2007

Gee I Wish I Had Known This Back at USDA

The "Overcoming Bias" blog has lots of good stuff, rather academic though. Today they have two posts on "planning". Or rather, the planning fallacy, because "The planning fallacy is that people think they can plan, ha ha."

Or: "When people are asked for a "realistic" scenario, they envision everything going exactly as planned, with no unexpected delays or unforeseen catastrophes - the same vision as their "best case".

Reality, it turns out, usually delivers results somewhat worse than the "worst case".


The advice is: when in the midst of a project, ask your experts for how long it took other similar projects to complete. If I'd done that, I would have skipped involvement in several failed projects, mostly attempting to cross bureaucratic lines (or merge "stovepipes").

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