Planning Fallacy

AThe Planing Fallacy is a common cognitive bias resulting in predicting absurdly short timeframes for planned projects, famously observed with, among other projects, the Sydney Opera House, completed ten years late and a hundred million dollars overbudget.

• Planning Fallacy
• Surface Analogies and Deep Causes]

• Planning Fallacy by Eliezer Yudkowsky
• Surface Analogies and Deep Causes by Eliezer Yudkowsky]

See also

• Outside view
• Near/far thinking
• Forecast

When possible, take the outside view. Avoid estimating the time for a project by adding time estimates for sub-tasks; instead, look for previously completelycompleted projects of similar type and scale, and base the estimate on how long those other projects took.

"It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."

-- Hofstadter's Law, from Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Summary

The bias also seems to be related to taking an "inside", detail-oriented view of the project to be planned; studies show that the more detailed a plan is, the more optimisticlyoptimistically inaccurate it is likely to be.

Debiasing Techniquestechniques

ReferencesBlog posts

Overcoming Bias Articles

• Planning Fallacy by Eliezer Yudkowsky
• Surface Analogies and Deep Causes by Eliezer Yudkowsky

When possible, avoidtake the outside view. Avoid estimating the time for a project by adding time estimates for sub-tasks; instead, look for previously completely projects of similar type and scale, and base the estimate on how long those other projects took.