The context of planning provides many examples in which the distribution of outcomes in past experience is ignored. Scientists and writers, for example, are notoriously prone to underestimate the time required to complete a project, even when they have considerable experience of past failures to live up to planned schedules. - - Kahneman and Tversky (1979)
One of the most universal, and robustly demonstrated, cognitive biases is the planning fallacy. Evidence of the planning fallacy has been constant throughout this project.
The planning fallacy was first proposed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, is a phenomenon in which predictions about how much time will be needed to complete a task/project, display an optimism bias.
The majority of sprints
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We would always default to the best case scenario and allow a tiny bit of time for that ‘just in case’ moment which, for me anyway, meant “just in-case I procrastinate for far too long”. We rarely factored in anything going fantastically wrong. When something did go wrong, we were inherently lucky that it never jeopardised the integrity of the project.
As we were/are an entrepreneurial team, we never had a strict client to answer to. This meant that the planning fallacy didn’t pose a threat as it easily could have. It came into play a lot more for us at the start but, as we near completion, we have become more prepared and skilled at guessing the probable date of completion for most of the sprints.
When planning there are two ways to look at it, an inside view and an outside view. The “inside view” is when you generate your predictions and time estimates by thinking about all the unique details of how it’s going to go this time – planning where, when, and how. Apparently, people's natural inclination is to generate guesses by focusing on details of a specific case, rather than on general information about a related set of