One way to learn how the world’s biggest building projects work—or don’t—is to start with some of the smallest building blocks: Legos.
In the 1950s, when Lego decided to make one product the centerpiece of its business, the Danish company went looking for a single toy that could be the foundation of an empire. It picked the colorful plastic bricks that have captured the imagination of children ever since. It was a wise choice. It was also a fitting corporate strategy: Lego turned a small thing into something much bigger.
“That’s the question every project leader should ask: What is the small thing we can assemble in large numbers into a big thing?” says University of Oxford economist Bent Flyvbjerg. “What’s our Lego?”
He understands the power of Legos better than anybody, and not just because he is also Danish. Bent Flyvbjerg is an expert in the planning and management of “megaprojects,” his name for huge efforts that require at least $1 billion of investment: bridges, tunnels, office towers, airports, telescopes and even the Olympics. He’s spent decades wrapping his mind around the many ways megaprojects go wrong and the few ways to get them right, and he summarizes what he’s learned from his research and real-world experience in a new book called “How Big Things Get Done.”
Spoiler alert! Big things get done very badly.