The planning fallacy: why projects usually take longer than the estimate
The inside view: why a project plan only shows the way things go right
You plan a project step by step, and every step plays out in your head the way you planned it. Psychologists call this the inside view, and it pulls every estimate toward the best case.
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You picture the delivery app step by step: the map page, the driver's screen, the messages to customers. Three weeks, your list says.
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Each step plays in your head like a short film, and in each film, the step goes the way you planned. That's what a plan is: a story of the steps you can see, going right.
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Looking at a project from inside its own plan has a name: the inside view. Kahneman and his colleague Dan Lovallo gave it that name in 1993.
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None of the surprises that made the cake app late were in your plan, and some you could not have listed at all. So how can an estimate make room for problems nobody can picture yet?
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An older name for the same thing.