WHY does everything take longer to finish and cost more than we think it
will?
The Channel Tunnel was supposed to cost 拢2.6 billion. In fact, the
final bill came to 拢15 billion. The Jubilee Line extension to the London
Underground cost 拢3.5 billion, about four times the original estimate.
There are many other examples: the London Eye, the Channel Tunnel rail link.
This is not an exclusively British disease. In 1957, engineers forecast that
the Sydney Opera House would be finished in 1963 at a cost of A$7
million. A scaled-down version costing $102 million finally opened in
1973. In 1969, the mayor of Montreal announced that the 1976 Olympics would cost
C$120 million and 鈥渃an no more have a deficit than a man can have a
baby鈥�. Yet the stadium roof alone鈥攚hich was not finished until 13 years
after the games鈥攃ost C$120 million.
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You might assume that gross incompetence is behind such fiascos鈥攅ither
that or a Machiavellian plot to secure approval for projects that once started
cannot easily be cancelled. But research carried out at the University of
Waterloo in Ontario by psychologist Roger Buehler and colleagues suggests that
the main cause may lie deeper. Buehler found that students consistently
underestimated how long it would take them to finish their assignments. They
seemed to have an over-idealised vision of a smooth future and rarely
anticipated more than trivial impediments.
Of course, as anyone who has had to listen to students鈥� excuses will know,
work schedules have a habit of being disrupted by all kinds of unimaginable
events. In his book G枚del, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter proposed
Hofstadter鈥檚 law: it always takes longer than you expect鈥攅ven when you
take Hofstadter鈥檚 law into account. Life is richer than any fiction so it is
impossible to imagine everything that could disrupt a plan.
There are exceptions. When I appeared on a television programme to discuss
why people are so often late, I was introduced to a professor of literature who
is always absurdly early. He imagines any number of potential catastrophes that
could disrupt his plans, and will arrange to arrive at airports some eight hours
before departure.
To have a hope of predicting how long something will take or how much it will
cost, you need to check the past. As Danish philosopher S酶ren Kierkegaard said,
while life has to be lived forwards it can only be understood by looking
backwards. This seems fine when we are judging other people鈥檚 work. When asked
to predict how long fellow students would take to complete a task, Buehler鈥檚
subjects immediately pointed to their previous performances on meeting deadlines
and adjusted their forecasts accordingly. However, when asked to predict their
own completion times they blithely ignored the lessons of their own previous
missed deadlines and suggested hopelessly optimistic schedules. They only
changed their predictions when pushed to imagine a scenario in which their plans
were disrupted.
Such short-sightedness results in some bizarre habits. While I was in
Washington DC recently I visited the Supreme Court building. My guide stopped to
point out the court clock, which has been kept 10 minutes fast since the 1860s.
Apparently this proved an excellent method for keeping proceedings punctual. It
is a nice irony that the ultimate arbiter of truth and justice has to lie to
itself in order to function properly.