Why Humans Struggle To Meet Deadlines
“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” — Douglas Adams
The Sydney Opera House is one of my favourite buildings. I think it’s a stunning reflection of Sydney’s beauty and energy, and I’ve spent many an evening there, seeing a play, having a drink, and enjoying the sprawling views of the harbour.
The building was commissioned in 1958.
“Should be done by 1963”, everyone decided. The budget was $7 million.
1963 comes and goes.
In 1964, Tokyo hosts the Olympic games.
In 1968, Kennedy is assassinated.
In 1969, Neil Armstrong takes the first human steps onto the moon.
In 1972, the ground-breaking video game Pong is released to the public.
No one first hears any of this news while sipping on a cocktail with friends at the Opera House. Because it isn’t done yet.
The Opera House wasn’t completed until 1973; costing an additional ten years and almost $100 million more than initially planned.
Erm… what?
How does something like that happen?
There were some unexpected hold-ups. Many argue the core issues began with starting construction too quickly, before the architects had figured out the final nuts and bolts.
I suppose it’s possible that all the people involved were incompetent fools.
More likely, though, some cognitive biases were of influence here — namely, the planning fallacy, otherwise known as the “you-make-plans-and-God-laughs”[1] cognitive pattern.
Whoosh.
The Planning Fallacy
The planning fallacy is the reason one of my best friends, who is renovating the house she bought with her partner, hasn’t moved in yet.
It’s the reason launch dates are hard to stick to, and why deadlines seem reasonable when you’re setting them but absurd as the date creeps closer.
It’s why someone else had to find a last-minute wedding venue just three weeks out from the date, because the one they booked twelve months ago that was ‘definitely going to be redone and ready by then’ is… not.
Put simply, the planning fallacy is the tendency to underestimate how long and/or challenging a project will be, and overestimate our ability to execute it; resulting in unachievable plans and deadlines that don’t reflect reality.
The planning fallacy is often a consequence of our optimism and personal overconfidence, the latter of which I’ve written about before.
Personal overconfidence in our abilities might be a result of the Dunning-Krueger effect (we don’t know enough to realise how little we know) or the general human tendency to presume we are very competent at things. Accordingly, we might expect ourselves to complete a project more quickly than standard practice, or faster than we’ve done before. We might intuitively think it will be an easy, smooth process. We might feel so good about writing up the plan in the first place that it feels like it’s practically done already. Ha, so simple! Right?
The Inside View
Even when we’ve encountered similar tasks, we tend to look at upcoming assignments as unique and underestimate how much time and energy they will take.
Daniel Kahneman and Dan Lovallo discuss the planning fallacy in relation to the ‘inside view’. When we have a new project, we think about that specific project, rather than similar past projects.
As an example, with my corporate training I am often tasked with putting together a training event tailored to a specific company or group: Designing a program, filling out the content, building activities and facilitation discussions, designing visual aids and references, practising and then delivering the program.
If I receive the requirements of the project and think only about the program at hand, I’m liable to minimise how long it will take to complete.
Even though similar projects may have taken a week to put together, I may focus only on the specific needs of this project, and decide it will only require a couple of days. I might not think about the potential time-delayers that came up in previous projects, that could also arise here. I may underestimate how long it will take to develop a relevant role play, or find that one passage I want to use from that 600-page book.
Consequently, not zooming out to compare this project with a ‘reference class’ can lead to a very stressed corporate trainer. According to Kahneman and Lovallo, it’s important to look at the big picture and take the ‘outside view’, to see how long similar projects have taken to complete.
Whoosh.
Unfounded Optimism
In our plans, we presume flawless execution.
There won’t be a plumbing problem that stops our renovation for weeks on end or a computer glitch that sucks all your work into some virtual Bermuda Triangle, the work never to be seen again. There won’t be a key person in the business resign in the middle of the project, or rain on the day you were shooting an outdoor scene, or another project popping up that demands your attention.
Of course not. Those things are not according to plan.
The optimistic prediction bias toying with us here may be why we don’t learn from our mistakes. Even if we missed a previous deadline on a similar task, we’re optimistic about the next one. It plagues the everyday entrepreneur, writer, scientist, artist, student, business professional and university professor.
Optimism is fabulous in most contexts. But when it comes to planning, it’s better to err towards the conservative.
Anchoring
And, finally, we get stuck to our ideas. It likes to be consistent, the human brain. So, if we’ve deduced that a project will cost no more than $20,000 and three weeks, even if new information arises that suggests it won’t, we’re likely to resist that idea. This is called anchoring; where an initial number, concept or decision is ‘anchored’ in our mind so we struggle to stray far from it.
Anchoring could be that final frontier, the one that keeps us clutching onto our plan even after we should have acknowledged its blind spots. It’s especially difficult to adjust expectations dramatically — if I planned it for three weeks, it will be hard to accept that it will actually take three months. That’s a long way to pull an anchor.
(Anchoring will get its own newsletter soon enough, because it’s a fascinating psychological tool, too.)
What to do?
The general consensus for most cognitive biases seems that simply being aware of them doesn’t improve our decision-making.
That said, the planning fallacy seems to be a somewhat preventable conundrum if we take conscious steps to minimise it, put our ego aside and learn from our mistakes. (Perhaps I’m optimistic.)
If we’re starting a project we have no experience in (like, say, renovating a house), consulting experts and doing research prior can help set realistic timelines.
Also, I tried pottery wheel throwing for the first time recently, and to my surprise I was abysmal. Not just bad. Abysmal. I literally managed to spray clay water directly into my face and onto my glasses.
My new goal is no longer to make a realistic Japanese-style tea set, but rather to make one bowl that is structurally sound.
My point is this: assume that, at new things, you will suck. Grant extra ‘I suck’ time to fix the inevitable early mistakes you’ll make in a novel project. (Sucking is not a bad thing, but in some cases may result in clay-covered clothing.)
If it’s something we have got experience in, we need to be more conservative about our magical abilities; consider which previous tasks most relate and use their timelines as a baseline. (As Kahneman would say, take the outside view).
Break down big projects into small tasks to calculate a more reasonable deadline.
Don’t be a hero. There is a temptation to inject exceptionalism into our planning. “Most people would need a week, but for me…”
Sometimes we really are a hero who can execute a project faster, better, more exceptionally than others. Usually not the case, though. Ask yourself what you’d expect a reasonable person to achieve, and give yourself that deadline. Realism is your friend.
Consider what could go wrong. The gift of foresight requires an analysis of potential delaying factors: If there are loads of possible or probable variables you can’t control, grant yourself extra leeway. Be realistic about the probability of a delaying factor intervening with your plan. If there is luck involved (e.g. finding the perfect vintage tile, or securing an interview with a hard-to-reach person), grant even more leeway.
Finally, build in some breathing room anyway. If you can give yourself extra time to allow for unknowns, you can focus more readily on the project at hand. And, if it’s a delivery to a client, it’s much nicer to under promise and overdeliver than to hand over a late brief.
Appreciate that things happen. There’s only so much we can control, and so much we can account for. No one would have planned for a pandemic, for example, to interrupt their big strategy for the year. And, at some stage we have to put the plan down and start moving — so we have to allocate an appropriate amount of time and energy to planning before execution.
As long we do our best, think objectively and shove our ego inside a padlocked box, we can minimise some of the planning fallacy side effects.
When have you experienced the planning fallacy or seen it play out? I’d love to hear about it.
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