Tuesday Keynote

Dan Gardner

Award Winning Journalist & Best-Selling Author

Getting Big Things Done

The world's largest database of major projects reveals that a shockingly small percentage of projects are completed on budget, on time, and with the outcome envisioned. That means the most important elements of the business case are far off base. Worse, projects aren’t merely at risk of being a little off - catastrophic failure is frighteningly common, and the story is the same around the world for projects of all sizes. In this talk, Dan Gardner draws on his book How Big Things Get Done to look at why failure is so common and what successful project leaders can teach us about conceiving, planning, and delivering on our own projects, big and small.

Bio

Dan Gardner is also the New York Times bestselling author of four books — Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear; Future Babble; Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, and his most recent, How Big Things Get Done, co-written with Oxford University Professor Bent Flyvbjerg. He is an honorary senior fellow with the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public Policy and International Affairs and writes the Substack newsletter PastPresentFuture, about history, psychology, risk, and decision-making. Prior to becoming an author, Gardner was a newspaper columnist, talking head, and investigative journalist who won or was nominated for every major award in Canadian newspaper journalism.

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