With Albert O. Hirschman, project management scholarship has what it lacks the most: an eminent intellectual and social scientist who has thought long and hard about project management, and especially the management of large transformative projects. Cass Sunstein, co-author of Nudge and a key...

This paper explores how theories of the planning fallacy and the outside view may be used to conduct quality control and due diligence in project management. First, a much-neglected issue in project management is identified, namely that the front-end estimates of costs and benefits -- used in...