Every planning meeting eventually gets to this line: “Sure, but our situation is different.”
It’s usually said with total conviction, and by someone smart. The logic underneath it feels airtight — you know your team, your resources, your customers, your specific plan down to the week. Why would you weigh that against some abstract average of what happened to a hundred other companies you’ve never met? Your case is concrete. Theirs is a statistic. No contest.
Except the data says the opposite, and it’s not close. Bent Flyvbjerg spent decades studying major infrastructure projects worldwide, and his findings are blunt: roughly nine out of ten go over budget, often by a wide margin. Not the unlucky ones. Not the badly managed ones. Nine out of ten, full stop, across decades of projects and every country he’s looked at. The people running these projects weren’t careless — they were the same kind of experienced, capable planners currently telling you their situation is different. And their situation was different too. It just wasn’t different in the way that mattered.
That’s the trap. The closer you are to something, the more detail you can see, and the more convinced you become that your case is the exception. Private equity investors — people whose entire job is judging which ventures will succeed — fall into this too. Give them a single project to study closely, and they’ll talk themselves into believing it’s a sure thing. Step them back to compare it against similar deals broadly, and the flaws they missed up close suddenly show up.
None of this means the inside view is worthless. You need it — it’s the only way to actually build anything. But it was never designed to tell you your odds. It was only ever designed to tell you your plan.
I’ve watched a board reject a competitive analysis outright because they believed their company was too unique for the comparison to apply — right down to insisting their competitors weren’t even real competitors. I understood the instinct. I don’t think it served them.
The question worth sitting with isn’t which view is right. It’s how you’d know, in your own case, that you’d started leaning on one so hard you’d stopped checking the other.