Strategic Misrepresentation
How Unrealistic Promises Get Approved
Happy Tuesday, Transformation Friends. Another week, another opportunity to go Beyond the Status Quo.
What if a big reason major public projects go off the rails isn’t technical complexity, but subtle deceit in the opening business case?
This week, we’re looking at something Bent Flyvbjerg calls strategic misrepresentation: when people deliberately lowball the true cost, inflate expected benefits, and downplay risk to get a project approved. In blunt terms, it’s lying on paper to unlock funding and authority.
Flyvbjerg’s research across large public projects shows how common this pattern is: over budget, behind schedule, and weaker results than promised (Flyvbjerg, Holm and Buhl 2002; Flyvbjerg 2009). Nine out of ten “megaprojects” don’t deliver on time, on budget or the results they promised (Flyvbjerg 2014).
This matters because the first “story” we hear about the project (usually in something like a business case) becomes the official truth. It becomes the baseline in your Treasury Board submission, the briefing note your deputy reads, the commitment to Canadians, and the line audit and evaluation will eventually come back to. Once you’ve said, “We can do it for $120M in 18 months,” you own that number, even if everyone in the room knew it wasn’t real.
Today, we’ll look at what this behaviour actually is, why people keep doing it even when they know better, and what good practice looks like, whether you hold the pen or you’re trying to influence the person who does.
Grab your morning coffee, and let’s get started.
Strategic misrepresentation is selling, not forecasting
Strategic misrepresentation is deliberate distortion. You make the project look safer, cheaper, faster, and more beneficial than it really is because you know that’s what will get it approved. Flyvbjerg describes it as political rather than technical. You’re not forecasting, you’re selling (Flyvbjerg, Holm and Buhl 2002; Flyvbjerg 2009).
There’s also a quiet arms race built into the system. If you believe other teams are sweetening their story to win scarce funding, you feel pressure to do the same or lose out. You’ve seen the pattern:
A department promises to rebuild a critical legacy system “within 18 months,” even though the last attempt at the same class of work took four years and still isn’t fully adopted.
A capital plan says a new facility can be delivered for $140 million, when internal costing puts it closer to $190 million once you include contingency, bilingual service requirements, and long-term maintenance.
A transformation project claims “significant efficiency gains” in year one. There is no baseline for the current effort, no method to track the savings, and no signed agreement on who will actually release headcount.
And we often hear things like:
The assumptions will be refined in delivery.
Schedule risk is manageable.
It’s a realistic stretch target.
The goal here isn’t to understand the work. The goal is to get a yes, lock in authority, and secure the funding. Once that “yes” is recorded, the numbers become the baseline everyone defends, even if we didn’t truly believe them in the first place.
The system rewards this behaviour
This keeps happening, even in organizations full of capable and well-intentioned people, because the system rewards it.
Scarce money and internal competition
Large public projects compete for limited capital, constrained headcount, and hard-to-find skillsets, especially now. When branches or departments are fighting over a fixed pot, they’re rewarded for promising more benefit for less cost, sooner. Flyvbjerg calls this “jockeying for position” (Flyvbjerg 2009). The most attractive story often wins, not the most accurate forecast.
Political and executive clocks
Leaders are under real pressure to show motion. A deputy minister wants visible progress before year-end. A minister wants an announcement this quarter. A CIO wants proof of early value before the next funding gate. None of this is unreasonable. It is, however, perfectly designed to produce promises that ignore the realities of delivery.
Hope, confidence, and willpower
Not all of this is bad faith. Some of it is optimism bias.
Optimism bias is the tendency to believe our plan will go well and that we’re different from the average person. We underestimate cost, effort, and risk. Lovallo and Kahneman show how leaders routinely overestimate benefits, underestimate timelines, and penalize people who surface bad news (Lovallo and Kahneman 2003). Flyvbjerg distinguishes optimism bias, which is self-deception, from strategic misrepresentation, which is intentional deception (Flyvbjerg 2009). Both lead to bad numbers. The difference is motive.
“We can do it for less because this team is exceptional.” That’s optimism bias.
“Do not include the contingency estimate in the deck. It will scare off Finance.” That’s strategic misrepresentation.
Governance rarely stops it
We tell ourselves governance will catch this. After all, committees exist to challenge assumptions and protect the institution. In practice, most governance bodies don’t interrogate estimates. They ratify spend, confirm alignment to mandate, and record that “a challenge took place.”
The sequence is familiar:
The material arrives the night before the meeting.
We flip to a cost table. We skim for the delivery date highlighted in green.
If we’re lucky, there’s a benefits slide and a risk map.
The question put to the table is, “Are we comfortable approving this so work can start?”
The question is rarely, “Is this number grounded in anything we’ve actually delivered before?”
Flyvbjerg has a phrase for this: “the survival of the un-fittest.” The projects that should lose often win because their promises are the most unrealistic. The honest proposal, the one that says, “This will take three years and 20 FTEs,” loses to the fantasy that claims it can be done in 12 months with contractors and minimal operational impact (Flyvbjerg 2009).
Most of us have watched a table nod through a delivery date that no delivery lead in the room believed.
The debt created by selling a fantasy
Strategic misrepresentation creates two kinds of “debt.”
Delivery debt
Delivery teams inherit an impossible baseline. They start under-resourced, already behind, and boxed in by a promise that was never real. From day one, the work is framed as “recovery.”
Overruns get labelled “emerging issues,” even though nothing is surprising. Studies of hundreds of public works projects show average cost overruns of roughly 20 percent for roads, about a third for bridges and tunnels, and close to half for rail, with multi-year schedule delays to match (Flyvbjerg, Holm and Buhl 2002). This pattern is consistent across megaprojects of all kinds (Flyvbjerg 2014).
Reputational debt
Sponsors inherit reputational debt. Variance after variance has to be explained to senior leadership, central agencies, and sometimes Parliament and the public. Time goes into recovery plans instead of delivery. Audit takes an interest. The file becomes known as “troubled,” and people with career risk quietly step back.
Once you’re carrying both kinds of debt, you’ll be told to recover without increasing cost, scope, or schedule. That’s impossible arithmetic. The predictable response is quiet scope trimming, phased timelines that slip a few weeks at a time, and a final outcome that’s smaller and later than promised.
What good looks like in practice
There’s no silver bullet, but there are habits that make strategic misrepresentation harder to sustain.
Use reference class forecasting
Flyvbjerg advocates for reference class forecasting (Flyvbjerg 2007). In plain language, stop estimating from scratch. Base your numbers on real outcomes from comparable projects, not internal optimism.
Ask: “For work like this, done in organizations like ours, what did it actually cost? How long did it take? When did benefits show up?” This approach was adopted in the UK for major transport projects precisely because traditional estimating kept failing (Flyvbjerg 2007).
Reference class forecasting frustrates people who want fast approval. That friction is a feature, not a flaw.
Define “done” in public, early
You can’t manage cost, schedule, or benefits until “done” is explicit.
“Done” is not “the vendor deployed version one.” It’s “the promised outcome is live in operations, people are using it, and someone is measuring the benefit.”
Forcing that definition early exposes weak benefit claims and surfaces real accountability. It also makes it harder to declare victory halfway through to satisfy a political milestone.
What to do, depending on your role
If you’re the leader
Set an honest baseline in writing before approval. Ask for the reference-class view. Ask Finance, Procurement, HR, and the delivery lead what this kind of work actually cost last time once contingency, vendor management, backfill, bilingual rollout, testing, training, privacy, records management, and security accreditation are included. Do not accept, “This time will be cleaner.”
Ask for evidence.
Put the definition of “done” into the approval package. Spell out what will exist in production, what service or process will change, which indicators will be tracked, who owns them, and when. Attach this to the decision record.
Surface real risk while it’s still cheap. Build a formal gate where delivery, cost, and schedule risk are disclosed to your CFO and audit partners before contracts are locked in. That’s institutional protection, not delay.
Reward accuracy, not theatre. Make it safe to tell you uncomfortable truths in private and unacceptable to sell fantasy in public.
If you’re influencing up
Your job is to move the conversation toward honesty without being labelled “negative.”
Protect your credibility first. You don’t accuse the plan of dishonesty. You say, “I want to make sure we can defend these assumptions if audit or the Deputy asks.”
Use reference questions rather than direct challenge. “Have we ever delivered something of this scope in 12 months here? If so, I’d like to see that file so I can model resourcing.”
Get “done” on paper. Ask when the initiative will be considered delivered, then capture that in meeting notes and circulate them. You’ve just created a baseline.
Frame timeline risk as reputational protection. “If we publish this date and miss it, we’ll need to brief the Deputy and prepare committee notes. Would you like me to propose a milestone with more buffer?”
A simple thought experiment
Your department’s investment committee receives two proposals.
Proposal A promises $120M, delivery in 18 months, immediate efficiency savings, zero procurement risk, and bilingual rollout on day one.
Proposal B proposes $170M over 36 months, phased delivery, benefits starting in year three after process change and training, with clear risks and mitigation.
Which one reads better on the surface? Which one is more likely to survive contact with reality?
Flyvbjerg’s warning is straightforward. Institutions keep choosing Proposal A. That feels bold in the short term, but it funds fiction. This is the survival of the un-fittest (Flyvbjerg 2009; Flyvbjerg 2014).
Wrap up
Strategic misrepresentation has become a survival tactic. We understate cost, overstate speed, and exaggerate benefits to get approval, then spend years paying off delivery and reputational debt. Flyvbjerg’s work shows that our governance systems often select against honesty.
There is a way to push back. Build estimates from real history. Define “done” before approval. Surface risk early, while it’s still cheap.
Make accuracy safe.
Ask yourself:
Who owns the truth about cost, schedule, and benefits on my file, and is it captured anywhere I could table in governance tomorrow?
Do we have a written definition of “done” that reflects real outcomes, not just deployment?
Am I rewarding accuracy and candour, or confidence and story?
Until next time, stay curious and I’ll see you Beyond the Status Quo.
References
Flyvbjerg, B. (2007) ‘Curbing Optimism Bias and Strategic Misrepresentation in Planning: Reference Class Forecasting in Practice’, European Planning Studies, 16(1), pp. 3–21. doi: 10.1080/09654310701747936.
Flyvbjerg, B. (2009) ‘Survival of the unfittest: Why the worst infrastructure gets built – and what we can do about it’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 25(3), pp. 344–367. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/grp024
Flyvbjerg, B. (2014) ‘What you should know about megaprojects and why: An overview’, Project Management Journal, 45(2), pp. 6–19. doi:10.1002/pmj.21409.
Flyvbjerg, B., Holm, M.K.S. and Buhl, S. (2002) ‘Underestimating costs in public works projects: Error or lie?’, Journal of the American Planning Association, 68(3), pp. 279–295. doi:10.1080/01944360208976269.
Lovallo, D. and Kahneman, D. (2003) ‘Delusions of success: How optimism undermines executives’ decisions’, Harvard Business Review, 81(7), pp. 56–63. https://hbr.org/2003/07/delusions-of-success-how-optimism-undermines-executives-decisions