Project-based work has always been fraught with challenges and setbacks (Hirschman, Reference Hirschman1967; Ika & Saint-Macary, Reference Ika and Saint-Macary2023). No project is a long and quiet river, the adage says. As the French writer Molière wrote in Tartuffe, or The Impostor in 1664, “There’s a long way from the project to the thing.” We know from years of collective experience and research that projects tend to have a complicated life (or “behavior”) of their own with plenty of detours, out-turns, inflection points (Williams, Reference Williams2005), peripeties (Engwall & Westling, Reference Engwall and Westling2004), drift or dead ends (Kreiner, Reference Kreiner2020), branching off assigned paths, going off track, zigzagging, and ending perhaps as tragedies (Bröchner, Reference Bröchner2022) or, if one is fortunate, happily (Hirschman, Reference Hirschman1967). Targets set may be realized anywhere but on target, from near misses to outright failures (Ika et al., Reference Ika, Love and Pinto2022), as projects routinely experience “the potential for breakdown and repair” (Strauss, Reference Strauss1988, p. 172). As Ika et al. (Reference Ika, Love and Pinto2022, p. 3319) note, “projects harbor tensions between projections and plans, decisions and actions, outputs and outcomes, success criteria and success, and project management success and project success, the ignorance of which may be the reason why projects fail more than they succeed.”

At the core of “how projects work” (Love et al., Reference Love, Sing, Ika and Newton2019a, Reference Love, Ika and Ahiaga-Dagbui2019b) is a schism between the projected and the realized future (Kreiner, Reference Kreiner, Lundin and Hällgreen2014, Reference Kreiner2020), which may explain why projects systematically deviate from assigned plans and paths and result in far too common project management paradoxes (Ika et al., Reference Ika, Love and Pinto2022). For instance, on the one hand, the development of major projects, those time-bound initiatives that are of a large-scale, inter-organizational, or complex nature, is significantly increasing, aimed at delivering economic, social, and institutional infrastructure and/or tackling grand challenges. The world’s most pressing issues such as climate change, global pandemics, and unsustainable development all fall into this latter category. Between China’s various “Belt and Road” initiatives, infrastructure redevelopment under “Build Back Better” funding in the US and Europe, and the huge increase in developing world projects, multi-trillion ($USD) investments are widely anticipated. On the other hand, these major projects often make headlines for the wrong reasons, due to their chronic underperformance. Typically, they suffer from a fivefold intersection of considerable delays at their completion, staggering cost overruns, dismal benefit shortfalls, painful stakeholder disappointments, and harmful sustainability outcomes (Flyvbjerg & Gardner, Reference Flyvbjerg and Gardner2023; Ika & Saint-Macary, Reference Ika and Saint-Macary2023).

The consequences of major projects failing on these criteria are well-reported; however, we hear far less about why these failures occur and what are the contingencies, especially the unanticipated events or opportunities and threats, that arise (Schutz, Reference Schutz1973; Strauss, Reference Strauss1988; Browning & Ramasesh, Reference Browning and Ramasesh2015; Ika & Saint-Macary, Reference Ika and Saint-Macary2023). Evidence suggests that the development life cycle of major projects rarely follows a logical path that sophisticated planning and risk management might chart at their outset (Hirschman, Reference Hirschman1967; Ika et al., Reference Ika, Love and Pinto2022). As is often the case, many projects fail during ideation, whether through technical shortcomings, funding failures, or changes in strategic direction. Many others initially appear to show promise in their front-end phase but quickly become bogged down. The California High-Speed Rail project provides a fitting illustration. The target cost of the project, approved in 2008 and scheduled to be complete by 2020, ballooned to some $100 billion over its initial budget and it has yet to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco, its original objective (Shalby, Reference Schalby2024), as politicians struggle to salvage a fraction of value from the venture.

Still other major projects commence only to be abandoned completely or partially. Among recent examples of completely canceled projects is the decade-long and $ 10-billion Apple car project. Dubbed “Project Titan,” it suffered what some of Apple’s employees call “Titanic disaster,” as it became clear that “Apple would never be able to sell vehicles at its expected margins, especially with the declining EV market and competitors racing to the bottom” (Hilliard, Reference Hilliard2024). The HS2 project in the UK, a high-speed railroad that was planned to connect London and the North of England, is a further case of a partial cancellation. It was initially proposed in 2009 with an estimated cost of £37.5 billion. Since then, the project costs have spiraled out of control and the current cost estimate for the full business case is over £100 billion. In October 2023, the UK government announced that the Birmingham to Manchester leg, part of Phase 2, had been canceled, and instead, some of the money would be spent on upgrading existing infrastructure and improving connectivity between northern cities (Tetlow & Pattison, Reference Tetlow and Pattison2023).

A recurring theme in the lives of many projects is that they are delivered only after significant hiccups along the path to completion. Consider, for example, the Crossrail megaproject, in London, UK. While the project concept goes back to 1974, it has taken different out-turns and exhibited many instances of systematic deviations from plans over its lifetime. Indeed, not only was the £2.5 billion (1991 prices) project shelved in 1996, but it had to evolve in scope subsequently from a cross-London to a commuter railway, directed by a single actor to becoming a temporary alliance with the Greater London Authority, before later including, in addition to suppliers, groups of local stakeholders outside project governance boundaries. Continuing in fits and starts, the anticipated budget had reached £16 billion by 2007 (including a contingency of £5 billion) and £18 billion by 2009. Taking advantage of the concurrent recession and pressure to reduce the budget, the completion date was delayed before the project finally moved into its construction phase. After several additional adjustments, Crossrail was budgeted at £15 billion. By 2019, when, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the project had to be stopped to put in place new safety measures, the supplier costs increased by 53 percent over the 2008 forecast. Such a complicated behavior in the face of changing scope and end date, governance alterations, and shifting economic environment, explains much of its cost overruns (Gil & Fu, Reference Gil and Fu2022).

It is in the context of the projects we have discussed and their persistent failure to perform or succeed as expected that the objective of this book was forged. It is to examine a fascinating, elusive, and complex phenomenon that occurs in the lifetime of major projects: the observance of project behavior in which there are systematic deviations between project initiation and execution (Ika et al., Reference Ika, Love and Pinto2022). Following Schutz (Reference Schutz1967, Reference Schutz1973), we consider projecting and comporting to be interrelated phenomena. Projecting, in the Schutzian sense, is a throwing forward to some imagined end while comporting, a term that Heidegger (Reference Heidegger and Kiesel1985, p. 41) made his own, is an act that is a directing-itself-toward some end. We take this to suggest that project delivery and project behavior are two sides of the same coin since complexity and uncertainty intervene between imagination and action, a gap that characterizes major project work (Daniel & Daniel, Reference Daniel and Daniel2018; Love et al., Reference Love, Ika, Matthews and Fang2024a, Reference Love, Ika and Pinto2024b).

In this introductory chapter, we begin by explaining what project behavior is and why it matters for project management scholars and practitioners alike. Next, we review the key principles of project behavior and how they each connect to project complexity, risk, uncertainty, and performance, from both a scholarly and practical standpoint. We then provide a historical context for the different theories of project behavior before offering our typology. Finally, we will provide a summary of the chapters in the handbook and how they advance our thinking in terms of project behavior theory and practice.

What Is Project Behavior and Why It Matters

The notion of project behavior dates back at least to the seventeenth century. In what is perhaps the antetype of the project management discipline (Cleland & Ireland, Reference Cleland and Ireland2007; Winch et al., Reference Winch, Brunet, Cao, Winch, Brunet and Cao2023), the English novelist Daniel Defoe offered an essay on projects and the “projecting age” in reference to his times in the UK in particular and Europe in general. He depicts a “project-oriented behavior,” where the notion of the major project is “a vast undertaking, too big to be managed, and therefore likely enough to come to nothing” (Defoe, Reference Defoe1697, p. 20), and is seen, above all, as an instrument in the hands of “projectors,” that is, promotors of schemes, to deliver social, cultural, political, literary, and scientific change, not always for personal gains (Maldonado, Reference Maldonado2002; Novak, Reference Novak2008).

More than three centuries later, the notion of project behavior abounds in the project management literature (Wynn et al., Reference Wynn, Smith and Killen2021; Ika et al., Reference Ika, Love and Pinto2022). To get a sense of the interest of scholars in the notion of project behavior, we undertook a search in June 2024 using the keyword “project behavior” and generated some 4,680 results in Google Scholar. The same search in the two leading journals in the project management field yielded respectively 1,665 results for International Journal of Project Management and 1,060 results for Project Management Journal, with half of these results appearing in the last 10 years alone. This is a testament to the worldwide use of the term by scholars and practitioners.

Notably, research that seeks to understand the overall behavior of the project as a system of systems (Daniel & Daniel, Reference Daniel and Daniel2018) or to model events, such as project completion or resource allocation behaviors, is common (Colon & Garland, Reference Conlon and Garland1993). Likewise, it is not rare to come across research that investigates the effects of the project manager’s leadership, team management behavior (Bendoly & Swink, Reference Bendoly and Swink2007), or other stakeholders’ behaviors (Beringer et al., Reference Beringer, Jonas and Kock2013), including project sponsors (Kloppenborg et al., Reference Kloppenborg, Tesch and Manolis2014) on project performance, such as the escalation of commitment (Keil et al., Reference Keil, Mann and Rai2000). We read often about the human behavioral aspects of those working in project settings (Slevin & Pinto, Reference Slevin and Pinto2007; Pinto, Reference Pinto2022) such as normalization of deviance (Pinto, Reference Pinto2014), collaborative and opportunistic behaviors of contractors (Galvin et al., Reference Galvin, Tywoniak and Sutherland2021), and optimistic and pessimistic project status reporting behavior (Kaufmann & Kock, Reference Kaufmann and Kock2023). We also come across multiple studies on behavioral decision-making in projects (Stingl & Geraldi, Reference Stingl and Geraldi2017) including the role of cognitive biases such as overconfidence (Shore, Reference Shore2008), strategic misbehaviors such as lies (Flyvbjerg et al., Reference Flyvbjerg, Holm and Buhl2002), smart heuristics (Love et al., Reference Love, Ika, Matthews and Fang2024a, Reference Love, Ika and Pinto2024b), and the “cognitive gear switching” of project managers between their gut-feelings and rational choice tools (Nowińska & Pedersen, Reference Nowińska and Pedersen2024) in project delivery. In short, the field of project management has long plumbed the depths of work on system and human behavior when exposed to the unique challenges of the project setting, but in a larger context, what does the notion of project behavior entail and why does it matter?

A Family of Five Principles of Project Behavior

Recent years have witnessed a conversation about two competing principles of project behavior: Daniel Kahneman’s Planning Fallacy and Albert Hirschman’s Hiding Hand (Hirschman, Reference Hirschman1967; Kahneman, Reference Kahneman2011; Flyvbjerg, Reference Flyvbjerg2016; Ika, Reference Ika2018) (see Table I.2 for examples and read Chapters 1 and 2 of this book for ample discussion).

The Planning Fallacy, supporting belief in the tendency for projects to over-promise and under-deliver, suggests that forecasts of project schedules, costs, and benefits are by and large unrealistically close to best-case-scenarios (Kahneman, Reference Kahneman2011). According to Planning Fallacy proponents (Flyvbjerg & Gardner, Reference Flyvbjerg and Gardner2023), systematic biases, such as optimism bias, and misbehaviors, such as strategic misrepresentation, creep into how projects are selected, managed, and reported on. Optimism bias is the belief that decision-makers are less likely to face risks than statistical judgment warrants. Strategic misrepresentation stands for the deliberate manipulation of cost and benefit estimates, typically intended to paint a rosier picture than true estimates might warrant, in the belief that it is better to get a project started and later “beg for forgiveness” than submit real expected cost numbers that could kill the project at the outset. Psychology and power thus combine to explain the dreadful underperformance of entire classes of projects, including mega dams, rail and infrastructure, Information Technology, and Olympic Games. So resonant are the warnings of Planning Fallacy champions that public sector decision-making has been significantly affected; for example, the requirement in some UK government departments that all new project proposals be subjected to a “reference class multiplier” for cost estimation or the 2016 decision by Virginia Raggi, mayor of Rome, to withdraw her city’s bid to host the 2024 Olympics, citing historical evidence of huge cost overruns. In these and other ways, it is clear that Planning Fallacy supporters have created a hugely influential perspective that is guiding both decision-makers and project management researchers.

A competing perspective known as the Hiding Hand, however, suggests that this propensity for promoters to overestimate the benefits and underestimate the costs and difficulties of their assigned projects is not always bad, as creativity may come to the rescue in unforeseen circumstances (Hirschman, Reference Hirschman1967). In other words, Hiding Hand proponents (Ika & Saint-Macary, Reference Ika and Saint-Macary2023) suggest that data arguing that most projects are “dead on arrival” due to systemic errors in initial estimation coupled with willful misrepresentation, as argued in the Planning Fallacy, grossly over-represents this position, arguing that such premeditated culpability is simply one potential source of project failure but does not consider how initial miscues may actually unexpectedly spur creativity and make projects turn into success. This is the case of many UNESCO world heritage sites or other great engineering feats of the modern world such as the Hoosac Tunnel in the US and the Sydney Opera House in Australia. Clearly, these projects would not have been undertaken if their promoters had known the real costs and difficulties that they would confront. In other words, cost-benefit analysis, as recommended by Planning Fallacy proponents, could have ended up costing the world a great deal indeed.

A debate has thus emerged in the project management literature over whether the Planning Fallacy outweighs the Hiding Hand or whether bias (e.g., optimism bias) trumps error (e.g., scope changes, complexity, and uncertainty) as the most likely explanations of project underperformance (Flyvbjerg et al., Reference Flyvbjerg, Holm and Buhl2002; Flyvbjerg, Reference Flyvbjerg2016; Ika, Reference Ika2018; Love et al., Reference Love, Sing, Ika and Newton2019a, Reference Love, Ika and Ahiaga-Dagbui2019b). As competing theories of cost overruns and benefit shortfalls, these views shape much of the debate on project planning; to wit, are decision-makers deliberately (or even subconsciously) prone to misbehaviors and biases at the outset (leading to poor project outcomes) or do simple planning and execution errors account for most project underperformance? Readers can quickly understand how this debate about project behavior is important when it comes to best curbing project underperformance, either through applying “bias uplifts” or “best practices.” Because the presumed cause of underperformance is quite different, adherents to each school of thought promote very different (and potentially expensive or unhelpful) solutions to project delivery and governance. Yet, while some headway has been made in the debate, we still do not know in what circumstances the principles of behavior such as the Hiding Hand and the Planning Fallacy work and how project actors can deal with complex out-turns during the lifetime of their assigned projects (Love et al., Reference Love, Sing, Ika and Newton2019a, Reference Love, Ika and Ahiaga-Dagbui2019b). As it has been shown that the protagonists of the debate (e.g., Flyvbjerg versus Ika/Love and Kahneman versus Hirschman) hold antagonistic worldviews about projects and project management (Kreiner, Reference Kreiner2020; Ika et al., Reference Ika, Love and Pinto2022), one of the goals of this handbook is to examine this debate through the perspectives of different scholars and different schools of thought and address these outstanding questions from both a theoretical and practical perspective.

Two additional project behavior principles, lesser known in the project management literature, have been added for a total of four, including: (1) the Hiding Hand or Benevolent Hand, (2) the Planning Fallacy or Malevolent Hand, (3) the Passive Hand (which leads decision-makers to stifle creativity and avoid risks), and (4) the Protecting Hand or precautionary principle (which tackles ignorance through risk management and scenario-planning). Put differently, the twin principles of the Hiding Hand and the Malevolent Hand are part of a family of Four Hands (Anheier, Reference Anheier, Wegrich, Kostka and Hammerschmid2017).

Each of these four principles of behavior is associated with the forward-looking appreciation of the complexity (e.g., underestimation or overestimation) and uncertainty (e.g., ignorance or awareness) of the project, which are common features of major projects (Browning & Ramasesh, Reference Browning and Ramasesh2015; Ika & Saint-Macary, Reference Ika and Saint-Macary2023). As we learn from Anheier (Reference Anheier, Wegrich, Kostka and Hammerschmid2017), the Hiding Hand, the equivalent of the Apollo mission’s “Houston, we have a problem here,” emerges as a result of the combination of ignorance and underestimation of complexity, whereas the Malevolent Hand is the product of the combination of an awareness of full knowledge and willful underestimation of project complexity. The Protecting Hand appears to be at work when there is concomitantly an awareness of a lack of full knowledge and an overestimation of complexity. The Passive Hand is about overestimation of project complexity when the state of knowledge is such that few unknowns should come as a surprise.

While these four principles of project behavior offer superior explanation for project underperformance, they fail to account for the shades of gray between success and failure or between optimism and pessimism. Therefore, Ika et al. (Reference Ika, Love and Pinto2022) propose the Fifth Hand principle of project behavior, which offers a pluralistic approach to understanding major project cost overruns and benefit shortfalls by combining elements and assumptions embedded both in the Planning Fallacy and the Hiding Hand and recognizing that effective diagnosis of underperformance requires a willingness to accept the existence of multiple causes, both bias and error (see Table I.2 for illustration) (Pinto, Reference Pinto2023). The Barcelona 1992 Olympics also offers a mix of both the Hiding Hand and the Planning Fallacy as strategic misrepresentation about the capacity of the Olympic stadium occurred (strategic overoptimism) and yet optimism bias (sincere overoptimism) also triggered enough creativity to turn the project into a success in the end. As Casellas and Lehtonen (Reference Casellas and Lehtonen2024, p. 7) write: “For the megaproject literature, the Barcelona case demonstrates that sincere and strategic overoptimism operated in tandem, and that the distinction between the ‘Hands’ is not necessarily the most important aspect.”

Theories of Project Behavior: A Brief Historical Context and Underlying Assumptions

As we have seen, project behavior captures complex out-turns during the course of the project along with initial decisions and actions, events and emerging decisions and actions, and inaction and indecisiveness (March, Reference March1994; Stingl & Geraldi, Reference Stingl and Geraldi2021). While there may be “decisions without actions and actions without decisions” (Brunsson, Reference Brunsson1982, p. 32) as in the case of the iPhone project where the action of producing the scratch-resistant screen was taken by Corning CEO Wendell Weeks before a decision was made (Amil, Reference Amil2022), the project behavior literature has primarily focused on decisions.

As projects require a wide variety of decisions (Stingl & Geraldi, Reference Stingl and Geraldi2017, Reference Stingl and Geraldi2021), historically, project management techniques, as taught in universities and training programs, have focused on the use of myriad decision-making tools. These tools include: (1) direct evaluation techniques such as checklists; (2) deterministic criteria-based evaluation techniques such as weighted scoring models, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Choosing By Advantages (CBA), and financial models such as cost-benefit analysis, net present value (NPV), and internal rate of return (IRR); (3) stochastic criteria-based evaluation techniques such as decision trees and risk-based profitability analysis; (4) deterministic planning techniques such as decision gates, Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), and CPM; and (5) stochastic planning techniques such as expected monetary value, risk sensitivity analysis, and PERT. Most of these techniques, we note, have been devised in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to tame the projected future (Rolstadås et al., Reference Rolstadås, Pinto, Falster and Venkataraman2015). In short, our longtime focus was on developing and promoting the use of these toolkits as a means for aiding managers in their organizational and decision-making challenges when running projects.

As decision-making under conditions of perfect or near-perfect certainty is nearly impossible to come by (Kahneman, Reference Kahneman2011), the project behavior literature has increasingly focused on decision-making under risk; that is, a context where, according to Knight (Reference Knight1921), an individual making a choice knows the potential outcomes of each available option and their probabilities of occurrence (see Table I.1). As such, project behavior under risk is dominated by probability logic. For example, Reference Class Forecasting (RCF), which is a widely used method to curb cost overruns, is a technique of predicting the future or the likely outcome of a purposive action, based on the forecast error of similar past actions; that is, the discrepancy between their projected costs and their actual costs. In constructing confidence intervals for future project costs based on historical performance of projects within the similar reference class, the technique is based on the probability distribution of expected, “true” costs (Lovallo & Kahneman, Reference Lovallo and Kahneman2003; Flyvbjerg, Reference Flyvbjerg2006).

The above-mentioned original stream of project behavior research is grounded in the economics literature, which sought to understand individuals’ preferences in games of chance (Kahneman, Reference Kahneman2011). Bernoulli (Reference Bernoulli1738) proposed expected utility theory where he demonstrated how individuals do not choose the available option with the highest expected value of an outcome but instead the expected utility of an action or the sum of the products of the utilities and probabilities for each of the outcomes that could result from the decision. The key question remains: How should individuals choose an action from a set of possible actions? von Neumann and Morgenstern (Reference Von Neumann and Morgenstern1944) then derived a number of decision-making axioms that posit that rational individuals should choose the available option with the highest expected utility theory, which represents the rational choice.

As the theory goes, to maximize their expected utility, the decision-maker needs to know the exhaustive and mutually exclusive set of actions and their future outcomes and probabilities. As is often the case, this theory evolved over time. As Gigerenzer (Reference Gigerenzer2020, p. 1370) remarks: “This basic theory has been modified in many ways, such as in prospect theory, and the learning of probabilities has been modified by Bayes’ rule.” Despite its widespread appeal, the expected utility theory came under attack in economics for its ill-suited computations, its underlying assumption of perfect knowledge about the exhaustive sets of actions and future outcomes, and lack of evidence for the existence of its stable utility functions (Gigerenzer, Reference Gigerenzer2020). Over time, however, expected utility theory and its variants such as prospect theory, provided the rational prescriptions on which much of the descriptive literature on decision-making under risk in the management field is based (Holmes et al., Reference Holmes, Bromiley, Devers, Holcomb and McGuire2011).

Expected utility theory remains a powerful explanation of project behavior. We can point to two examples to make this point in the project management field. First, as Michele Alacevich, a historian of the World Bank, writes, cost-benefit analysis, a premier project appraisal tool, offers an interesting illustration of these rational prescriptions:

Second, Piney (Reference Piney2003) provides an application of expected utility theory to project risk management. The author discusses the shortcomings of applying expected monetary value as a tool for assessing and mitigating risks and presents an alternative based on the subjective view of stakeholders (the “utility function”) to explain project behavior.

It is against the rational prescriptions of decision-making under risk and in particular tools such as cost-benefit analysis that the principle of the Hiding Hand (Hirschman, Reference Hirschman1967), “a theory” of behavior at the project level, was developed. As Alacevich (Reference Alacevich2014, p. 160) notes:

Ironically, the Hiding Hand had long been unrecognized and uncredited in the project management literature, with only a few exceptions (e.g., Ika & Söderlund, Reference Ika, Love and Pinto2016). Scholars in the meantime had turned to two alternative theories to expected utility theory to explain risk-related behaviors while departing from many of the theory’s rational prescriptions: the theory of temporary organizations (Lundin & Söderholm, Reference Lundin and Söderholm1995) and the Planning Fallacy principle (for management, see Kahneman & Tversky, Reference Kahneman and Tversky1977 and Lovallo & Kahneman, Reference Lovallo and Kahneman2003 and for project management, see Flyvbjerg, Reference Flyvbjerg2006, Reference Flyvbjerg2016). Both the theory of temporary organizations and the Planning Fallacy principle form part of the behavioral decision theory literature in project management that directly challenges the precepts of expected utility theory (Holmes et al., Reference Holmes, Bromiley, Devers, Holcomb and McGuire2011; Stingl & Geraldi, Reference Stingl and Geraldi2017).

Lundin and Söderholm’s (Reference Lundin and Söderholm1995) theory of temporary organizations also helps us understand project behavior – how and why things happen – and its wider implications on creativity, learning, and innovation throughout the project life cycle (Geraldi & Söderlund, Reference Geraldi and Söderlund2018). The theory of temporary organizations is inspired by the behavioral theory of the firm (March & Simon, Reference March and Simon1958; Cyert & March, Reference Cyert and March1963) but it differs as it is an action-based, not decision-based, theory, or as the authors put it: “There may not be any logical connection between decisions and actions” (Lundin & Söderholm, Reference Lundin and Söderholm1995, p. 438). The behavioral theory of the firm, which operates at the organizational level, not at the individual level as does expected utility theory, posits that bounded rationality prevails because humans are limited in accessing, processing, and using information (Simon, Reference Simon1955, Reference Simon1957); this theory provides a detailed account of decision-making processes in organizations, which may compare their performance to aspiration levels, thereby shaping their risk-taking preferences (Holmes et al., Reference Holmes, Bromiley, Devers, Holcomb and McGuire2011).

For its part, the Planning Fallacy principle, which sheds light on the behavior of projects where underestimation of costs and overestimation of benefits prevail, is based on prospect theory (see Kahneman & Tversky, Reference Kahneman and Tversky1979 and Tversky & Kahneman, Reference Tversky and Kahneman1992 for management and Ika et al., Reference Ika, Love and Pinto2022 and Chapter 1 in this book for project management). As Ika et al. (Reference Ika, Love and Pinto2022, p. 3310) write: “Under the banner of prospect theory, the Planning Fallacy emerges as a phenomenon whereby planners and managers display optimism bias during the framing and valuation phases of projects. The upshot is the tendency for forecasts of project times, costs, and benefits to be close to best-case scenarios.” Prospect theory is not a normative theory like expected utility. Rather, it relaxes the assumption of logical rationality of people in favor of their bounded rationality and emphasizes the role that the latter plays in their decision-making. Prospect theory, which offers a unified theory of individual risk taking, was developed in the context of controlled experiments where individual choices between alternatives are assessed, each of which involves potential outcomes and their respective probabilities of occurrence. As such, though the Planning Fallacy is assumed to be working at the project level, its underlying prospect theory operates at the individual level of decision-making and explains if not predicts decisions under risk (Holmes et al., Reference Holmes, Bromiley, Devers, Holcomb and McGuire2011).

The Fifth Hand, which we earlier discussed, also operates at the project level (Ika et al., Reference Ika, Love and Pinto2022). Like the Hiding Hand, it assumes that the risk context of decision-making differs from the uncertainty context of decision-making (Knight, Reference Knight1921; Gigerenzer, Reference Gigerenzer2020) where probability logic falls short as “we need to consider how we should make decisions when some of the alternatives, consequences, and probabilities are unknown (i.e., this requires heuristics and intuition)” (Love et al., Reference Love, Ika, Matthews and Fang2024a, p. 205). The Fifth Hand principle is based on the theory of ecological rationality (Todd & Gigerenzer, Reference Todd and Gigerenzer2012). This theory of decision-making under uncertainty, not risk, which puts forth an “adaptive toolbox” of heuristics – a set of evolved and learned rules that project actors deliberately and intuitively use to help deliver projects – stipulates that a heuristic is good when it matches the structure of the context where it is applied (Gigerenzer, Reference Gigerenzer2020). The Fifth Hand and its underlying ecological rationality may thus help understand the circumstances under which projects successfully or unsuccessfully work (Ika et al., Reference Ika, Love and Pinto2022; Love et al., Reference Love, Ika, Matthews and Fang2024a, Reference Love, Ika and Pinto2024b). Table I.3 compares the key theories of project behavior and their underlying assumptions.

A Rough Typology of Theories of Project Behavior

The question of how to explain project behavior has preoccupied researchers and practitioners alike for decades. As we have mentioned, many project behavior theories have sought to explain, and even predict, project behavior. Following the work of the German psychologist, Gerd Gigerenzer, long-time director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, we may distinguish between “tools-to-theories,” “as-if-theories,” and “adaptive toolbox theories.”

The Structure of the Book

This handbook on project behavior (and misbehavior) is organized in three parts and contains chapters by a well-regarded and engaged set of international project management scholars to reflect on a broad spectrum of perspectives. Part I discusses the principles of project behavior and why they matter for project management theory and practice. Chapter 1, by Lavagnon Ika, entitled “The Rise and Fall of the Planning Fallacy: From the Impulsion to the Compulsion to Theorize,” offers a historical and critical evaluation of the nature of Planning Fallacy explanations for project behavior, especially as they relate to project underperformance. His chapter presents a fuller picture of both the utility and shortcomings arising from this conceptualization. Graham Room (Chapter 2) follows with a chapter that lays out the key features of the Flyvbjerg/Hirschman controversy in the project literature, addressing the elements of both the Planning Fallacy and Hiding Hand while exploring some of the popular mythology and misunderstandings that continue to color our evaluation of these models. Along the way, he offers a defense of the Hiding Hand, suggesting that much of the resistance to Hirschman’s views comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of his theory, his experimental setting, and the conclusions he drew. In this chapter, Room makes an important contribution to our recognition of project behavior as evidenced by two of its most well-known alternative theories.

Chapter 3 in Part I, on voyages of discovery, by Rebecca Vine, Dicle Kortantamer, and Andrew Davies, borrows its title from the well-known description of project behavior by Hirschman. In their chapter, these authors probe a critical theme in projects, recognizing that an open system characterized as one seeking discovery will fundamentally clash with closed-system imperatives, such as control or too-rigid governance. How a project can balance this critical junction of leadership, control, and capabilities is a resonant thesis that the authors address. In “Temporal Structuring and Project Behavior” (Chapter 4), Ann Langley and Gerry McGivern offer a fascinating appraisal of temporal structures and the lengths to which key project participants go to retain an open system, with frequent input from partners and the positive midcourse corrections to the plan that these interventions spawn. They demonstrate that time and temporality matter for project behavior, referring to the ways in which participants engage with projects and varying according to whether the project operates in a context where deadlines are immutable or not. Finally, Part I concludes with Fran Ackermann’s contribution (Chapter 5) on the challenges of managing complexity and uncertainty in projects – two critical and interacting features that shape project behavior – through engaged stakeholder participation and continuous reappraisal. As stakeholder coalitions wax and wane through the project’s life, it is necessary to frequently monitor and make midcourse adjustments based on their composition and evolving perceptions of project requirements. They conclude that attempts by project managers to respond to uncertainty may well result in added complexity that they need to confront in turn, making project behavior a dynamic and challenging phenomenon in practice.

Part II of the book is organized around the thorny problems found in project complexity and uncertainty. Van Oorschot, Dille, and Söderlund (Chapter 6) address the challenges of “averaging behavior,” where complex projects composed of several sub-projects are susceptible to a form of balancing, in which divergent opinions of the status of the various sub-projects can lead to a desire to find a middle ground that actually results in overestimation of actual project performance. In presenting a longitudinal process study of an information systems project, they found that its hierarchy of sub-projects promoted unfavorable project behavior. Ralf Müller’s (Chapter 7) exposure of the vagaries of intra- and inter-organizational project governance sheds important light on forms of subsequent project behavior. Notably, he takes the analogy of project personality to describe different types of project behavior, which may depend, for example, on whether projects take an inward or outward perspective, or they focus on the consequences of actions or instead their correctness. Miia Martinsuo and Siiri Tuominen (Chapter 8) elaborate on a critical feature of macro-project phenomena, discussing project portfolio management and behaviors that are sparked through strategic portfolio alignment, dealing with uncertainties, and pressures toward portfolio realignment. Using examples from five projects, they show that project behavior is both a source of uncertainty and a potential mechanism for activating and promoting strategic realignment.

Kate Davis, Liz Machtynger, and Francesco Di Maddaloni (Chapter 9) offer a deeper dive into the challenges and mechanisms by which project-based firms can identify and formulate strategies for stakeholder management. Further, they address project behavior challenges when including different stakeholder perceptions for project performance. Their chapter demonstrates that it is essential to control the project’s outcome parameters through stakeholder expectations to minimize the chances of failure and maximize performance. Maude Brunet (Chapter 10) continues the focus on project governance with an intriguing chapter that identifies the dynamic nature of governance, as it can operate on three different models – hierarchical, heterarchical, and network – and to understand that shifts in project governance – proactive, reactive, radical, or evolutionary – provide turning points that shed light on project behavior, with far-reaching impacts on performance. Wolfgang Seibel and Katharina Eßmeyer (Chapter 11) provide a unique chapter that examines, through an extended case example, the issue of corruption in a project environment, specifically focusing on money laundering. They show how the tensions between the rationality of politicians and the rationality of administrative experts can challenge the delivery of the project and complicate its behavior over time. Continuing the theme of project behavior as pathology, the final chapter in Part II by Regis Signor and Peter Love (Chapter 12) focuses on the nature of mega-project corruption in the Brazil construction industry, reviewing a variety of causes and consequences of this ongoing challenge. Taking corruption as a willful, deceitful, and criminal project misbehavior enacted for monetary gain, they offer a chronological analysis of relevant facts and successive decisions taken by politicians and managers in specific mega-project cases and thus provide a context to understand how strategic misbehaviors occur in project settings.

Part III offers some chapters that address practical guidelines and applicable measures for dealing with project behavior, and more specifically, with varieties of misbehaviors. Ofer Zwikael, Alicia Gilchrist, and Jack Meredith (Chapter 13) kick off this part of the book with a discussion of the need for and methods to employ in setting realistic project goals, arguing that misbehaviors often occur in the margins; that is, where goals remain nebulous or open to multiple interpretations, there is a tendency for self-serving behaviors to exert themselves amongst the various stakeholders. Their contribution focuses on the analysis of seven major projects and offers ten practical recommendations to help managers set more realistic project goals. Their chapter is followed by Joana Geraldi, Verena Stingl, and Maximilian Schriewersmann’s treatment (Chapter 14) of the use of decision heuristics to improve project screening, arguing that better initial selection through smart heuristics can militate against potentially ruinous investments that were undertaken for unclear reasons and help smooth front-end project behavior. Their chapter consists in an empirical study on heuristics used by senior managers to screen and select which of the tendering opportunities of major infrastructure projects to pursue. Joseph Harrisson, Jens Roehrich, and Mike Lewis (Chapter 15) continue the focus on project front-end in their chapter with clear suggestions on how to apply project governance methods – contractual and relational governance mechanisms – to manage and minimize misbehaviors – at the individual, team, and project levels – that can snowball once the project is fully under way. They show how the two functions of control and coordination of the contractual and governance mechanisms can help tackle project misbehaviors such as strategic misrepresentation at the project level, normalization of deviance at the team level, and narcissistic traits of leaders at the individual level.

Ashwin Mahalingam’s contribution (Chapter 16) on twists and turns in project delivery provides a unique and highly readable account of his recent role in managing his own project – a residential construction – and discovering firsthand the manner in which misbehaviors and various out-turns occurred. Combining theory and real experience, his chapter is a refreshing look at the real way project vagaries assert themselves. Jeffrey Pinto and Greg Usher’s chapter on project disruptions (Chapter 17) introduces the theme of calculated responses. It is common to talk of robustness, resilience, and antifragility as types of responses to project disruptions. This chapter examines each of these responses to disruption in turn, arguing that circumstances and proactive decision-making can result in disrupted projects that actually recover as stronger and more value-creating than originally envisioned. The final chapter in Part III, by Morten Welde and Gro Holst Volden (Chapter 18) presents some important guidance on addressing two of the thorniest behavior problems in new project delivery – exploring the means for minimizing benefit shortfalls while curbing cost increases. Their work with the Concept Research Program in Norway for many years has resulted in a chapter of practical and cutting-edge expertise.

The book concludes with an Afterword by Stewart Clegg. Modeled on a similar approach taken by the late Professor Peter Morris for Making Projects Critical by Hodgson and Cicmil (Reference Hodgson and Cicmil2006), we asked Professor Clegg to offer his unique perspective on the nature of project behavior, his critical assessment on the chapters herein contained, and thoughts on research and theory gaps that can form a roadmap for future studies. His chapter, looking at the contributions in this handbook, forms a wonderful concluding word on the subject and a call for future effort in continuing to examine the nature of project behavior.

This handbook has been the result of years of reflection and active scholarship on the nature of project behavior, the ways it can be understood to impact project development and delivery, and the pathologies so often found both causing and resulting from the myriad vagaries and out-turns that projects take. In noting that where projects are concerned, “there is many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip,” this handbook is the logical outworking of a stream of research that has been internationally recognized and ongoing for some years now. We would be remiss to not offer our greatest and most sincere thanks to Professor Peter Love, who has been a major source of inspiration, guidance, motivating light, and supportive colleague as we conclude this handbook. It is fair and appropriate to state that the book itself, as well as the theoretical understanding of project behavior, would not have seen the light of day were it not for his personal contributions and support. Likewise, we extend our many thanks to Valerie Appleby, Tobias Ginsberg, and Caroline Parkinson from Cambridge University Press who have helped us successfully navigate the complicated steps in this handbook project. Our gratitude also goes to the reviewers who have worked tirelessly to help authors improve their chapters.

To conclude, we noted at the outset that the current debate on large-scale projects overruns and overspends has been front and center in the project management literature for the past several years, with debates and positions being exchanged in the pages of a number of academic journals as well as the popular press. Given the likely unabating interest in the topic and the divergence of opinions being offered (particularly in this age of rapid development of mega-projects around the globe), we strongly believe that the time is ripe for a scholarly handbook on the current state of this challenge, perspectives on project behavior and misbehavior, and its implications for practitioners and project professionals responsible for delivering these high-profile and highly complex projects. Collecting the reasoned perspectives of a broad array of widely respected scholars has given us the opportunity to create a book that has both academic validity and practical power.