Why big projects fail has always been the wrong question to ask.

There is renewed interest in trying to understand what goes wrong, when does it start to go wrong, and what we can do to avoid it?

But the only true constant about history is that it repeats.

In the past, we may have argued that people repeat history because of ignorance or a lack of knowledge. With projects, the first thing we learn is that every good project has to have; accurate planning, firm governance, an empowered team etc.

Is it that we are inherently biased and overconfident? That we cannot see the forest for the trees? Are we only recalling certain parts of history that already align with what we do and dismissing anything that may contradict this? Simply, yes.

Is history just too complex? A butterfly flapping its wings in one place can cause a hurricane in another through an unlikely chain of events (which, however, by the law of big numbers, will always have occurred somewhere sometime). Maybe?

While I think a number of these do contribute to why we never learn, the main answer is simply that we cannot learn alone. We are only ever one viewpoint, and we almost always surround ourselves with like-minded people (and convince ourselves that it is the best team for the job!)

How can we truly test what we’re planning and doing when everyone in the room has degrees of the same lived experience and will only give shades of the same answer? Next time you get a consensus on a topic, ask yourself - why are we all agreeing?