Principle 4 – Think slowly. Deliver fast.
The desire for speed leads many projects to cut preparation short. Successful projects deliberately invest more time in early decisions – and recover that time many times over during execution.
Few statements run more counter to today’s working environment than this one: “Take more time to prepare.”
Understandably so. Nobody wants to lose time. Yet in many cases, this is precisely where one of the biggest misconceptions in modern project work lies.
We often confuse acting early with making fast progress.
In his book How Big Things Get Done, Bent Flyvbjerg describes a principle that seems paradoxical at first: Think slow. Act fast.[^2] Flyvbjerg is by no means calling for slow projects. He is calling for projects that invest their time in the right place.
Exceptionally successful projects do not push complexity into execution. They resolve it beforehand. That is precisely why they often appear remarkably calm during execution. Not because fewer problems occur, but because many difficult decisions have already been made.
Frank Gehry’s projects follow exactly this pattern:
- Before a building takes shape, alternatives are developed.
- Models are built.
- Assumptions are challenged.
- Uncertainties are made visible.
From the outside, this phase looks slow. In reality, it accelerates everything that follows. Every open question answered before the first shovel hits the ground is one that does not have to be resolved later under time pressure.
Aus der Praxis
In my role as an Estimation Validator, I have often seen project teams respond to uncertainty with increasingly detailed project plans.
The more questions remained open, the more precisely deadlines were planned. And the less clear the requirements were, the more Excel spreadsheets appeared.
It looked professional at the time, yet a few weeks later the plans changed again – precisely because fundamental assumptions had not yet been clarified.
Interestingly, project plans became stable whenever they had been preceded by intensive discussions about goals, responsibilities and dependencies. This did not necessarily improve the planning itself, but it aligned the shared understanding.
Perhaps good planning is therefore not about defining as many tasks as possible as early as possible. It is about eliminating as much uncertainty as possible early on. That also changes how we think about speed.
A project does not become faster simply because execution starts earlier.
It becomes faster because fewer surprises occur during execution. Anyone who has experienced a major change request in the middle of a running project knows this effect: the real delay rarely comes from implementing the change itself. It comes from suddenly having to reopen fundamental decisions.
With every unresolved issue a project carries into the execution phase, the risk of such loops increases. That is why one simple question is worth asking before the project even starts:
Which open questions would cost us the most time during execution if we left them unanswered today?
This perspective alone changes many project conversations. Suddenly, the goal is no longer to start as quickly as possible, but to start as well prepared as possible. Over the past few years, I have seen many projects begin at impressive speed. Some of them lost exactly that speed again only a few months later.
Not because of technical difficulties or a lack of resources, but because decisions had to be made later that could have been made before the project started.
A good project plan does not save time. It saves later changes.
Perhaps this sentence captures the real difference between activity and progress. Activity means starting execution as early as possible. Progress means having to revisit as few decisions as possible later. The longer I work with projects, the more strongly I believe:
The most successful project managers are not the ones who start running fastest.
They are the ones who recognise when a project is truly ready to start moving. And this is where Frank Gehry’s way of working connects with Bent Flyvbjerg’s findings. Both show, in different ways, that exceptional projects are not created through perfect planning. They emerge because the right questions are asked early enough. Good preparation does not slow a project down. It prevents the project from having to brake again and again later.
