Let us begin with a proposition so banal that it passes, in boardrooms, for daring originality: most projects are approved on the understanding that reality will behave itself. The Best Case Scenario—capitalized, canonized, and deified—is treated as the baseline, as if Fortune herself had joined the payroll. One could call this optimism. One could also call it, with greater accuracy, a cult of false hope.

It Usually Starts off Well

A conscientious project manager, the sort who still believes numbers mean something, will dutifully inventory features, tasks, effort, time, and cost. She will even do the unfashionable thing: risk analysis. That tiresome discipline asks what might go wrong, how likely it is to do so, how hard it will bite when it does, and what mitigations cost. 

From this arithmetic of contingency, two bookends emerge. 

• • Best Case: nothing untoward happens; all risk remains theoretical, pristinely inert. 

  • Worst Case: the entire rogues’ gallery of risks strolls onstage, plus a few latecomers you were too innocent to imagine. 

These scenarios are not prophecies but illuminations. They map the tolerances of the enterprise, the width of the financial corridor through which success must pass.

How Bad Can it Be?

Enter the Steering Committee, that secular priesthood of the confident shrug. 

Present the Worst Case and watch the ritual commence. A senior eminence rolls his eyes—the gesture is contagious—and announces, with the authority of revealed truth: “Well, that’s the Worst Case. We’ll never be that unlucky.” The room exhales. The apocalypse is dismissed. Worst Case is ceremonially erased, not by reasoned rebuttal but by etiquette.

In a narrow sense, our eye-roller is correct. Worst Case is vanishingly unlikely. Team USA returning from the Olympics without a single medal is technically possible in the way that heat death is possible: conceivable, not expectable.

Do You Feel Lucky, Punk?

But unless you’ve sold your soul to symmetry, the same applies to the other pole. The Best Case—Team USA sweeping every medal in every event—is not merely unlikely; it is a parody of probability. 

And yet, when Best Case is presented, the room does not roll its eyes. It leans forward. It sharpens its pencil, not to discard the fantasy but to improve upon it—shaving the number further, as if audacity alone could cow arithmetic.

At this point one is tempted to inquire, with what diplomacy one can muster: which part of “Best Case” eludes comprehension? Do you intend to win more medals than exist?

Bookends are Usually the Same

Here, please, commit a maxim to memory (tattoo it if you must): the Best Case is as unlikely as the Worst Case. A point made over 20 years ago in Scott Burken’s The Art of Project Management.

This is not cynicism; it is statistics. But in the higher altitudes of governance, where oxygen is scarce and bonuses plentiful, only one figure survives the meeting: the prettiest one. 

The Knock-On Effect

This number migrates instantly into next year’s P&L, is embalmed in the budget, and—by a miracle of transubstantiation—becomes the denominator of someone’s year-end compensation.

Thus the project is launched under a banner of immaculate conjecture. The committee has wagered not merely that Team USA will win every medal, but that it will invent a few more to collect on the way out. 

But then Reality Joins the Party

When the inevitable friction arrives—risks materializing, mitigations costing—no one is surprised, only offended. Reality has failed to respect the slide deck.

What to Do Next Time Around

The cure, alas, is not more bravado but more adulthood: treat the Best Case as an outlier, the Worst Case as a caution, and plan for the tractable middle where risk is priced, change is governed, and success is earned rather than fantasized. Anything else is not management. It is daydreaming with spreadsheets.

– Photo from Pexels –