Good morning. Before you ask how your plan will go, find out how it usually goes.
Decisions.
Base Rates
For the decision in front of you this week — the hire, the build, the raise, the launch — do you know what happened to the last hundred people who stood roughly where you stand? If you have never looked, the reason is rarely that the number doesn't exist; it is that you can already guess what it says.
Fewer than one in ten came in on both budget and schedule. That is the record of more than sixteen thousand projects — bridges, films, IT systems, Olympic Games — collected over decades by Bent Flyvbjerg, the first BT Professor and Chair of Major Programme Management at Oxford's Saïd Business School, and reported in How Big Things Get Done (2023), written with Dan Gardner. Every one of those projects was planned by people who had looked closely at their own circumstances and concluded they were the exception. Flyvbjerg's remedy is reference class forecasting, built on Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's distinction between the inside view — the details of your case, your team, your plan — and the outside view, which asks a duller question: what happened to the last hundred people who attempted roughly this? The outside view's answer is the base rate. What makes this hard is that the inside view feels like knowledge. It is specific, it is yours, and it is almost always more optimistic than the record.
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