Thought Leadership Stage: Bent Flyvbjerg
Why do 99.5% of all mega projects fail? Bent Flyvbjerg, the world's leading expert in mega projects and author of the international bestseller "How Big Things Get Done" has answered this.
Event cancelled
Bent Flyvbjerg has unfortunately had to cancel the event. Ticket buyers will have the ticket price refunded to the card they bought the tickets with.
Nothing is more inspiring than a huge vision that becomes reality. The Empire State Building went from a sketch on a piece of paper to one of the world's most famous landmarks in just twenty-one months. Apple's iPod went from an idea to become one of the world's most familiar gadgets in just eleven months.
Right now, the world needs visionary ideas and projects that can come up with solutions to the consequences of the climate crisis and repair the damage. But unfortunately approx. 99.5% of the world's mega projects end with exceeded budgets, broken schedules and unmet success criteria with both human, climate and financial disasters as a result. And incredibly, all the projects fail for the same reason.
Thought Leadership Stage
On the Thought Leadership Stage, the Royal Danish Library addresses the state of the world and puts the philosophical and educational questions in relation to leadership and development in a broad sense on the agenda.
The event series consists of conversations with a selection of the world's leading profiles in the intersection between economics, politics, philosophy and management.
This is how you get great things done
Since the 1990s, Bent Flyvbjerg has researched why so many international mega projects fail and why so few succeed. In his international bestseller How Big Things Get Done (2023), he collects the results together with his co-author Dan Gardner and shows that the same mistakes are at the root of the projects' failure. Regardless of whether it is national prestige projects such as the Great Belt Tunnel or private projects such as house renovations and holiday planning, the same error patterns repeat themselves: planning and good preparation are lacking.
On stage in the Queen's Hall, Flyvbjerg will point out what the solution to the incredible paradox that everyone apparently makes the exact same mistakes could be.
Because in the midst of an international paradigm shift, we depend more than ever on innovative solutions to succeed. The technology is there, the visions are there, but the leadership to drive the projects through is lacking.
Participants
Bent Flyvbjerg
Bent Flyvbjerg is an internationally known Danish social scientist and one of the world's leading experts when it comes to researching and creating theories for the international mega project. He has a master's degree in geography and economics. Flyvbjerg is a professor from both Aalborg and the Dutch Delft University of Technology. In later years, Flyvbjerg has been employed at Oxford University and ITU.