Moving Beyond the Planning Fallacy: The Emergence of a New Principle of Project Behavior
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 FallacyversusHiding 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, wecomplexifythe 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—The Fifth Hand. 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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.033 | 0.047 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.066 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.029 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".