One way a project that was “supposed” to bring big money ends up being a money waster.

Business projects are owned by non technical people, and some of them don’t care about uncertainty estimation.

While the technical teams invest a lot of time on giving an accurate and simple to use picture of the uncertainty, for example with credibility intervals, people only go with the point estimate to estimate the impact a priori.

Then we measure the impact a posteriori, with a method they validated, and they reject the results saying it “doesn’t make sense”.

When you proudly presented a +$10M profit project (with 95% probability falling between -200M and +200M, which you completely ignored), good luck explaining your boss how your project caused a -$20M net loss.

Different strategies there:

• Rapidly transition to another project (with big $$ promised but no damn given to the uncertainty, just like the previous one) trying to make your boss forget about the previous one.
• Temper with the data until the impact a posteriori matches what you announced (or more! at this point, why not?)
• Avoid getting anyone to measure the impact of what you d

I always wondered if leadership is aware of that and just believes it works in the long run (after all, the point estimate is always positive), if they just don’t know that or worst, if they just try to make their own boss happy using the exact same strategy.