When making decisions in project and risk management, it is crucial to account for potential biases — especially our own. Personal biases can lead to poor decision-making, blind spots, and distorted risks perception. Since bias is part of human nature, the key is to recognize which biases we might hold and how they influence our thinking.
Biases can cloud judgment in both risk identification and risk assessment, resulting in risks being overlooked or improperly addressed. By acknowledging our biases, we can make better decisions, increase risk awareness, plan more realistically, avoid misprioritization, reduce silo thinking, and prevent repeated mistakes. This ultimately leads to fewer unexpected costs and more effective project outcomes. In short, recognizing our biases leads to greater knowledge — and more knowledge is always valuable.
There are hundreds of known biases, often grouped into categories such as behavioural, social, political, memory-related, and cultural biases. This article will focus specifically on behavioural bias. In 2021, Professor Bent Flyvbjerg published a paper titled “Top Ten Behavioural Biases in Project Management: An Overview”, in which he identifies the ten most impactful behavioural biases in project management.
Flyvbjerg‘s Top 10 behavioural biases in project management:
- Strategic misrepresentation:
Deliberate misstatement of information.
- Optimism bias:
Overestimation of positives, underestimation of negatives.
- Uniqueness bias:
Seeing plans as more singular than they actually are.
- The planning fallacy:
Underestimation of the time things take.
- Overconfidence bias:
Excessive confidence in own answers to questions.
- Hindsight bias:
Illusion of “I knew it all along.”
- Availability bias:
Overestimation of likelihood of events easily remembered.
- The base rate fallacy:
Ignoring generic odds, focusing on specific cases.
- Anchoring:
Relying on information, just because it’s there.
- Escalation of commitment:
Throwing good money after bad.
(Research by St Anne’s Senior Research Fellow, Prof. Bent Flyvbjerg, Identifies Top 10 Biases That Could Ruin a Christmas Holiday or a Billion-Pound Mega-Project | St Anne’s College, Oxford, 2025)
If you want to read how these biases can come to play into a project read our Friday RICO posts, that will come out throw August and September.
Source:
Research by St Anne’s Senior Research Fellow, Prof. Bent Flyvbjerg, identifies top 10 biases that could ruin a Christmas holiday or a billion-pound mega-project | St Anne’s College, Oxford. (2025, March 27). Ox.ac.uk.
Flyvbjerg, B. (2021). Top Ten Behavioral Biases in Project Management: An Overview. Project Management Journal, 52(6), 531–546.
