How to Make Things Faster

Chapter 102. The Problem with Underpromising

I think every consultant I’ve ever met has tried to abide by the mantra that you should always “underpromise and overdeliver.” It must be something they teach in Consulting 101 courses all over the world. The idea is that if you underpromise and overdeliver, you’ll end up exceeding expectations and looking like a hero. That’s the theory anyway. There’s a problem, though, which I can illustrate with a story.

Andy and Barney both optimize programs for a living. They’re competing against each other for a lucrative project, so they each propose an estimate of the value they expect to create. Andy estimates that he’ll be able to make an important program go two times faster. He believes he’ll do better than that, but caution and humility restrain his estimate. What Andy doesn’t know is that if he were to win the project, he would make the program go seven times faster.

Barney estimates that he’ll be able to make the program go three times faster, and on the basis of this estimate (because three is better than two), he wins the job. Barney is not as good at optimizing as Andy is, but he makes the program go three times faster⁠—​just as he’d promised—so the client is happy. The client doesn’t know, of course, but they would have been better off—and certainly Andy, the better optimizer, would have been better off, too—if Andy had been a better estimator.