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Your Biggest Risk Is You
Behavioral science convincingly shows we’re our own biggest risk. The causal chain that drives downside and underperformance in decisions starts with human bias. The solution is de-biasing.
Scientific revolutions rarely happen without friction. So, too, for the behavioral revolution in social science and economics. It has been met with skepticism, including in the field of project management, which we focus on here, because today the vast majority of business and government is delivered as projects.*
Despite mounting evidence that project performance is heavily influenced by behavioral issues, many experts in project management are skeptical and prefer to stick with conventional explanations that account for performance in terms of scope changes, complexity, labor and materials prices, archaeology, geology, bad weather, ramp-up problems, demand fluctuations, finance, and the like.
The root problem is not overrun, according to behavioral science, but underestimation.
Behavioral scientists would agree with the skeptics that scope changes, complexity, etc. are relevant for understanding what goes on in projects, but would not see them as root…
