Humans are always the hardest part: The one thing in…

Optimization projects rarely fail because of math — they fail because of people. Cognitive biases like status quo bias, planning fallacy, sunk cost fallacy, and the well-travelled road effect cause stakeholders to resist better plans, underestimate effort, and cling to familiar but inferior workflows. Even when an optimized plan is objectively superior, humans focus on the few changes rather than the many improvements. The real constraints in planning projects are psychological: fear of change, overconfidence in familiar processes, emotional attachment to past investments, and unrealistic timelines.