Casting a long shadow: On the death and abiding influence of Daniel Kahneman in shaping project management theory and practice

With the recent passing of Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner and influential thinker, the opportunity to offer reflection on his contributions to project management theory and practice is timely. Indeed, while Kahneman himself is no longer with us, his ideas continue to carry enormous weight in the project management field. This essay is offered as a festschrift and is accompanied by invited commentaries. We take stock of Kahneman's work on judgment and decision-making under risk; bias, error and noise; and the Planning Fallacy. We note that much of his work served as a foreshadowing of current scholarship and opened wide avenues for exploration in project management; everything from topics such as project behavior, causes and effects of project performance, happiness and well-being, and even foreshadowing the AI movement. We argue that Kahneman's ideas at the intersection of psychology and economics have not so much revised as upended our understanding of project management.