Major infrastructure projects redefine territories, stimulate the economy and promise to sustainably transform communities. Whether it’s a new transit network, a hydroelectric dam, or a national building program, these projects inspire both hope and fierce debate. However, such projects are often plagued by repeated delays, cost overruns and controversies, both in Canada and abroad. And the derailment of such projects is neither exceptional nor unique to any given country or sector.
For Lavagnon Ika, a full professor of project management at the Telfer School of Management and founding director of the Major Projects Observatory, such derailments cannot be explained by simple incompetence or faulty planning.
Rather, they point to something deeper: the way in which societies manage uncertainty, power and collective action.
“A major project always involves betting on the future,” he says.
Beyond errors and bias
Whenever a major project fails to meet expectations, public reaction, as well as academic findings, points to planning problems, poor management and/or inadequate feasibility studies.
These analyses refer back to what Ika calls the “school of errors”: the idea that projects fail mainly due to faulty planning, lack of expertise or unforeseen events.
Professor Ika also highlights another type of criticism, one that is similar but more psychological and that hinges on bias: project developers are too optimistic. They underestimate costs and timelines while overestimating benefits. Some even deploy opportunistic strategies to knowingly minimize risks in order to gain project approval.
“These explanations do not sufficiently account for major project failures. The real cause is elsewhere: it can be found deep in human nature itself.”
Dr. Lavagnon Ika
— Professor of Project Management, Telfer School of Management
He says that we cannot decouple human nature from systems, and that such errors cannot be reduced to individual mistakes or emotions. His theory is based on the fact that individuals evolve within political, cultural and institutional systems that influence their decisions and behaviours. These individuals never act in a vacuum: they are always dealing with regulations, power dynamics, social expectations and structural constraints.
Reducing the derailment of a major project to a simple question of error or bias ignores the constant interactions between human decisions and the framework of systems surrounding them.
Taking decisions for an uncertain future
Lavagnon Ika proposes another way of looking at major projects that go astray: recognizing that such projects, by their very nature, are characterized by uncertainty.
A major project is not a well-oiled machine: it’s a collective decision that will affect a future that does not yet exist.
Cost estimates, schedules and even technical solutions are never certain. They are projections, which is to say they are sophisticated bets on what the political, economic and social conditions will be in several years’ time. For the professor, this uncertainty is not a management error; instead, it is an attribute that is intrinsic to all major projects.
But he divides this uncertainty into three different dimensions.
The first is rational: technical uncertainties, incomplete data, unexpected factors due to the complexity of the work.
The second is political: competing interests between governmental, municipal, citizen group or private partner actors. “Each has its own project within the project,” he says.
The third is psychosocial: personal ambitions, professional reputations, collective narratives and the meaning attached to the project.
It’s the tensions between these dimensions, rather than a simple lack of planning, which explain why the project’s progress veers away from initial predictions.
A project’s five hands
To understand how these tensions and uncertainty tangibly affect the progress of a project, Professor Ika has designed an analytical grid based on what he calls the five hands.
A single overarching concept is central to this approach: what determines the success of a project is not the absence of errors, conflicts or bias, but rather how all the players and rules of the game react when problems arise.
In other words, success or failure depends less on perfect planning and more on the collective interactions that occur when faced with the unexpected.
The first four hands represent the human forces involved in every project:
- The benevolent hand refers to competent, committed actors who are driven to succeed. Their optimism can lead to underestimating obstacles, but it also feeds the energy needed to overcome such barriers.
- The malevolent hand represents the particular interests that could harness the project to fulfill their own strategic or opportunistic ends.
- The passive hand refers to those who notice problems as the project goes off the rails, but who hesitate to intervene, out of caution or fear of consequences.
- The protective hand corresponds to institutions, regulations and accountability mechanisms that position the project and ensure legitimacy.
The fifth hand does not represent any additional actor: it stands for the interactions between these forces in a given political, cultural and institutional context. In real life, it manifests as daily decisions: the choice to speed up production rather than to hold more consultations, to fudge the budget numbers under political pressure, to stick to a schedule or to adjust it when costs rise.
It is these decisions, shaped by institutional pressures and power relations, that progressively reset the project’s trajectory.
A project can be well-planned and run by competent managers, but still fail if the institutional pressures and rules of the game do not allow for needed adjustments. Conversely, a project under pressure can still succeed if the collective mechanisms in place allow for learning, mediation and adjustment.
Governing with uncertainty
For Lavagnon Ika, major projects are not only worksites, but also collective decisions taken with a long-term perspective.
They require constant mediation between effectiveness and legitimacy, ambition and caution, speed of execution and consultation. They reveal how a society sets its priorities and how well it takes responsibility for the resulting choices.
Viewing such projects solely through the lens of errors, delays or cost overruns reduces their significance: what is being played out is more than management. It’s a question of governance: the ability to change direction when conditions change without losing sight of the collective good.
Professor Ika’s model does not offer easy answers. Instead, he provides a framework that offers a different perspective on major projects and the choices they imply, which is precisely how we measure a society’s maturity.