Moving Beyond the Planning Fallacy: The Emergence of a New Principle of Project Behavior
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The question—what explains cost overruns and benefit shortfalls—remains an important conversation in project management. Two theoretical principles, the Planning Fallacy and the Hiding Hand, shed light on project behavior, that is how projects take different and complex out-turns. The Planning Fallacy denotes the tendency for forecasts of project schedules, costs, and benefits to be unrealistically close to best-case scenarios. The Hiding Hand, however, suggests that it is not always bad to overrate benefits and underrate costs and difficulties of the proposed projects as creativity may help succeed in unforeseen ways. This article focuses on the Planning Fallacy <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">versus</i> Hiding Hand or the Planning Fallacy debate. The bone of contention is whether the Planning Fallacy trumps the Hiding Hand and thus best explains project behavior and performance. We unravel the ontological, epistemological, theoretical, and methodological assumptions behind the debate. Then, considering these contrasting assumptions and the uncertainties and complexities that surround large-scale projects, we <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">complexify</i> the debate in line with the tradition of complexity thinking. In the face of the either/or framing that prevails, we propose a balanced theoretical approach that would accommodate both the Planning Fallacy and the Hiding Hand explanations of project behavior, to understand why projects experience cost overruns and benefit shortfalls. In so doing, we lay the foundations for the emergence of a new project behavior principle— <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">The Fifth Hand</i> . We conclude with a research agenda that highlights the key methodological challenges that need to be addressed to determine the presence of the Fifth Hand.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it