Scraping the memory barrel here… as I recall, the original “planning fallacy” research (or something near it) found that people’s time estimates were identical in the two scenarios:
“How long do you expect this to take?”
“How long do you expect this to take in the best-case scenario?”
The suggestion was much like what I think you’re saying here: that when people are forming plans, they create an ideal image of the plan.
Because of this, when I’d teach this CFAR class I’d sometimes describe the planning fallacy this way, as the thing that makes “Things didn’t go according to plan” never ever mean “Things went better than we expected!”
Scraping the memory barrel here… as I recall, the original “planning fallacy” research (or something near it) found that people’s time estimates were identical in the two scenarios:
“How long do you expect this to take?”
“How long do you expect this to take in the best-case scenario?”
The suggestion was much like what I think you’re saying here: that when people are forming plans, they create an ideal image of the plan.
Because of this, when I’d teach this CFAR class I’d sometimes describe the planning fallacy this way, as the thing that makes “Things didn’t go according to plan” never ever mean “Things went better than we expected!”