The Doom Loop

The bridge that costs four times its budget. The emergency law that creates a worse emergency. The programme everyone knows has failed, that somehow never dies. We tell ourselves these are accidents. They arent. Nine out of ten megaprojects run over budget, in every country with records to check — because a small set of reasoning errors combines, in the same order, into the same seven failure patterns.

The Doom Loop is the map of that machine: seven loops, each pairing a private error with a public excuse, each with its own warning signs — and its own kill switch. Every pattern is proven against the documented record — Concorde and the Bay of Pigs, the year Britain stopped trusting its own crime statistics, the checklist that halved surgical deaths — and the book closes with a field manual for auditing the loops inside your own institution. Built on the landmark research of Kahneman, Tetlock, Janis, Flyvbjerg and Gawande, and on the authors years inside public institutions as a banker and auditor, it ends with a ninety-second checklist you can carry into your next meeting. For the analyst, the official, the manager, and the citizen who refuses to be played: the most expensive mistakes arent unthinkable. Theyre predictable. And predictable means preventable.