David Epstein

Obviously had to make sure I could pronounce that one.

And yeah, because if anybody's trying to Google him, it looks like it's spelled Flibjerg.

And what he kept, he studied big projects for his whole career.

And over decades, he kept a database of projects, big projects.

This could be anything from infrastructure projects to digital transformations, whatever.

And he had 16,000, he led a lot of projects himself too.

He had 16,000 projects by the, or he worked on them.

I shouldn't say led, he worked on them.

He had 16,000 projects in his database by the end.

And what he found was that only 8.5% of them

came in on time and on budget, and only 0.5% came in on time and on budget and delivered what they had promised.

And the typical pattern he found was what he called think fast, act slow, where someone has an idea and they kind of rush it into implementation before they put boundaries around and really figure out what the priorities are and what they're doing.

And so things expand quickly.

And then that fast thinking translates to work slow because things get big quickly and then it's very hard to pivot and you start learning lessons more painfully.

The opposite,

What he said was the ideal kind of planning was think slow, act fast, where you keep a team small at the beginning.

You define the boundaries.

What are we not doing?

What is the focus?

And then when you do move into execution, you're able to work much faster because you're not getting surprised by as many things.