What Lego can teach us about saving the planet

Can Lego save the world? That’s one idea that stuck with me reading How Big Things Get Done, a new book by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. Flyvbjerg is perhaps the world’s leading authority on the failure of megaprojects — or how big things get done, but woefully late and at woeful cost — and so he makes an unlikely optimist.

Over the decades, Flyvbjerg, a management professor at Oxford university, has assembled a database of large projects from high-speed rail lines to hosting the Olympics. His findings are so dismal that he has proposed the “Iron Law of Megaprojects”: they are over time and over budget, over and over again. Even worse, there is a long tail to these disappointments. A significant minority of megaprojects are not just late and expensive, but catastrophically so.