Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Just How Good is Good? Take a DUL Moment to Find Out
Doug is the author of the landmark book, Extreme Project Management®: Using Leadership, Principles and Tools to Deliver Value in the Face of Volatility. He works with clients who undertake projects in very demanding environments: those settings that feature high speed, high change, high unpredictability and high stress. Doug has lived in the trenches—from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to Beijing, China—with over 275 project teams with budgets that ranged from $25,000 to over $25 million. He is one of the founders of the Agile Leadership Network, an organization dedicated to connecting, developing and supporting great project leaders. He is known for his hard-hitting and humorous keynote speeches that address vital issues facing today’s project-based organizations. You can visit Doug at www.dougdecarlo.com.
Writing in the 13th century, metaphysician Thomas Aquinas made a simple and profound statement in the introduction to The Summa Theologica, his seminal work: “A small mistake in the beginning leads to a big mistake in the end.” This insight applies as much to real-world projects as it does highfalutin philosophical treatises.
It’s a natural human tendency to start out wanting to make something as good as possible. But I’ve learned that’s not always wise, practical or even necessary. The newly minted, town-appointed septic engineer visited our home site in order to bless the blueprint for our waste disposal system. He concluded that we had to more than double what our own septic engineer had specified. This would have increased the cost of the septic system from $8,000 to about $15,000, making it large enough for “a small Latin American country,” as I sarcastically pointed out.
So I requested another opinion from the town authorities. Turned out that the $8,000 system was more than adequate for the expected demand. What happened? The well-intentioned novice engineer wanted to over-engineer the system to be on the safe side, although conditions would not have required such a system, even if we had doubled the number of bedrooms from three to six.
There are risks to both over-engineering and under-engineering a …
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"Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without." - Buddha |