Gorilla in the Cockpit: Breaking the Hidden Patterns of Project Failure and the System for Success

Whether you lead a company, a project or your life, Gorilla in the Cockpit is a smart investment.

—Scott A. Snook, Professor, Harvard Business School

Open the Megaproject Black Box and Avoid Billion-Dollar Disasters

Despite decades of analysis, reports, methodologies and experts, major and megaprojects ($1 billion plus) and change initiatives keep failing, Why?

Gorilla in the Cockpit is a revolutionary way to understand project failures. It reveals the hidden drivers of project crashes. The root causes cannot be found in traditional project management books. They are neither technical nor financial. They are human.

Gorilla in the Cockpit doesn't stop at diagnostics and explanations. It offers a solution based on latest research in neuroscience, psycholinguistics and behavioral economics, with practical application to real-life projects. Its framework encompasses all steps of managing megaprojects, from design to procurement, stakeholder management to execution, handover to sustainability.

Learn how to:


- Challenge how you see and lead megaprojects—and change programs.
- Understand the project Black Box and why it drives 65% failure rates.
- Expose the patterns destroying billions of shareholder value and taxpayer money.
- Explode the myth that project failure is inevitable.
- De-Risk your project and boost your success rate.

Gorilla in the Cockpit is a rare look behind the scenes of megaprojects by two seasoned experts. If you want to understand what really goes on in big projects, why they fail so often and what it takes for them to succeed, this book is a must-read.

—Bent Flyvbjerg, professor at Oxford & Copenhagen, principal author of How Big Things Get Done & Megaprojects and Risk.