The hidden reason billion-dollar projects overrun even with a stage gate

Episode Overview

Every major capital project team will tell you they have a stage gate process. Iwona Wilson’s argument is that having the process and having the capability to use it are two completely different things, and that the distance between them is where billion-dollar surprises come from. She spent the first part of her career auditing projects for compliance and watching compliant projects fail anyway; then eleven years on the owner side at one of Australia’s largest energy producers, designing and teaching the decision gate process and facilitating the opportunity framing workshops that happen before anyone calls it a project. In this conversation she gives a complete 101 on phases and gates, explains why the final investment decision is the wrong place to look for leverage, walks through the six dimensions of decision quality and the one that always fails, and makes the case that the messy, uncomfortable middle of a framing workshop is not a process failure but the price of alignment.

Episode Timeline

The conversation as it actually unfolded: ten chapters across roughly 81 minutes of on-the-record material, mapped against the show’s four-act structure. Click any block to jump to its chapter. The final block sits apart: it is the exchange the episode takes its title from, recorded after the formal wrap and carried into the published episode.

Who carried the mic

The Guest · Iwona Wilson

Iwona Wilson

Co-Founder & CEO, Wilson Biz Consulting · Author, Where Projects Are Won or Lost · Certified International Facilitator

Houston, Texas, United States

Decision Gate ProcessOpportunity FramingDecision QualityFront-End LoadingProject Governance

Iwona Wilson came into capital projects sideways: through quality. Born and raised in Poland, she took a master’s in economics and engineering at Wrocław University of Economics and Business with a major in quality assurance, and wrote her thesis on installing a food quality management system in a London brewery. A chance encounter at the Institute of Quality Assurance in London led to a graduate place at MW Kellogg (now KBR), then quality assurance engineering at Foster Wheeler on FEED and EPCm work for ExxonMobil, Statoil and Sasol across the UK and Norway. In 2010 she crossed to the owner side, spending eleven years at Woodside Energy in Perth as an opportunity framing facilitator, trainer and project advisor, designing and teaching the decision gate process, and becoming the business’s subject-matter expert on professional facilitation. Since 2021 she has co-founded and run Wilson Biz Consulting from Houston, where she facilitates framing workshops for owner teams, implements decision gate process, and teaches a live Decision Gate Cohort.

“Capital projects are won or lost before they even begin. Most projects don’t fail because teams can’t execute. They fail because the problem was never clearly defined, stakeholders aligned too late, risks surfaced after commitment, and decisions rested on untested assumptions. I was always the person in the room asking the uncomfortable questions early, the thinker among the doers.”Iwona Wilson · from her public LinkedIn profile

Career journey

The Host · Orion Matthews

Orion Matthews

Founder, Queryon · Host, The Major Project Podcast · PMO data & analytics

Eugene, Oregon, United States

Project Controls ReportingPMO Data AnalyticsCapital PortfoliosAI in ProjectsPower BI

Orion is an award-winning programmer, entrepreneur and technology executive who has spent the last decade in the engine room of major capital projects. He founded Queryon in Washington, D.C. in 2015 with a focus on data analytics and software for the construction industry, starting with bellwether client BP, whose project-controls solutions his team deployed globally, from the North Sea to Azerbaijan to Houston. Today he’s a recognized expert in PMO data analytics and project-controls reporting, serving billion-dollar portfolios for owners including BP, Santos, Balfour Beatty and Turner & Townsend, a regular speaker at major industry conferences on AI and analytics in capital projects, and the host of this show.

The Quality Route In

Orion opens with the show’s standing frame, then hands Iwona the question every guest gets: how did you get here? Her answer is not the one you expect from someone who teaches billion-dollar governance. It starts in Poland, runs through a London brewery, and turns on one generous colleague.

“I got into the oil and gas industry and the capital projects through quality assurance, actually. I’m born and raised in Poland, and I did my master’s in engineering and economics, and my major at that time was quality assurance.”Iwona Wilson · ~1:15

1. The standing open: learning from people who work on projects over a billion dollars, “trying to tease out lessons and learnings from these big endeavors.”~0:05 · Orion sets the frame, then introduces Iwona’s twenty years across oil and gas, mining and capital projects in Australia, the UK and the US
2. Poland, then a master’s in engineering and economics majoring in quality assurance.~1:20
3. The brewery thesis, and the reason she left. “I really like drinking beer. However, I had this realization that working at the brewery and smelling hops every day wasn’t really something I loved.”~2:10
4. Mayank Rawal, the Institute of Quality Assurance, and the graduate programme at MW Kellogg in London.~2:45

Decision Gate 101

Orion asks for a 101 “to help everyone, no matter where they came from, kind of understand what we’re talking about.” What follows is the most self-contained explanation of the stage gate process the show has run: origin, phase by phase, gate by gate, all the way through to the post-investment review. If you only listen to six minutes of this episode, listen to these.

“The idea is very simple. It’s really about moving an idea from the early thinking into the execution whilst reducing the uncertainty, the unknown that exists in a project. So it’s about taking an idea, initiative, or a project and breaking it into phases and gates.”Iwona Wilson · ~4:20

1. Origin story: “the stage gate process, which I call the decision gate process, some people call it the phase gate process, was initially developed by Dr. Robert Cooper for product development, product innovation. And then later on it really moved into capital projects.”~3:40
2. Most organizations run five phases and five gates; complexity and the nature of the opportunity can push that up or down.~4:45
3. FID, defined plainly: “that’s when the organization announces they have a project, and they ask the question, ‘Are we truly ready to execute this project?’”~7:05
4. The part most teams skip: the post-investment review, six to twelve months after the project moves into the new environment, evaluating the value actually delivered.~7:45
5. What the process really is, in four registers: a governance tool, a decision-making system, a way of thinking, and ultimately a risk management tool.~8:15

“Stage gate is seen as a governance tool, and it is a governance tool. But for me, it’s really more a decision-making system, and also it’s a way of thinking. It’s a way to bring clarity around what we are dealing with. It’s a way to bring confidence for decision-makers and the project team so they know what they’re investing in. And it’s the way to connect stakeholders from across the organization and allow them to contribute.”Iwona Wilson · ~8:15

Compliance Isn’t Confidence

Orion pulls the two halves of her career together: what does ISO 9001 quality work have to do with decision gates? Iwona’s answer is the origin of everything else she teaches. As a QA engineer auditing EPC projects, she kept finding the same thing: projects that were fully compliant, and failing anyway. She could not explain why. So she went to the owner side to find out.

“Most projects were compliant. Most projects follow procedures. They use the right templates. They apply the right guidelines. The boxes get ticked. But despite that, many of those projects would experience challenges, especially during execution, and some of them would be even cancelled, and somehow I never really knew why.”Iwona Wilson · ~11:20

1. The QA engineer’s job, described exactly: implement the project quality management system, then audit the project against contractual requirements, international standards and organizational policy.~10:40
2. The moment the reports stopped meaning anything. “My audit reports after a while begin to be the same… I didn’t really feel like I’m making a big difference.”~12:40
3. Orion brings in a mutual colleague, Akin Oni, and a title that has become shorthand in the space: The Operation Was Successful But The Patient Died. “You can follow all the procedures and still have high quality scores, but these projects were not actually being successful for the organizations.”~15:00
4. Iwona extends the metaphor to contracting: “if the patient goes for a surgery and then dies at the end, it’s the family which will take the consequences. It’s not often the doctor that is following their own procedure and their own framework.”~16:30
5. Who is actually accountable. “It’s the owner that has responsibility to set a project for success, because the owner focus is always long-term: how can we create with that project real value for the community, the environment, the organization itself.”~17:00
6. The blunt corollary: “When I talk to construction companies, they are not that interested in stage gate process, because if there is a change, they just gonna ask the client to pay.”~17:45

“A good governance should improve the quality of your decisions. It’s not just about generating more documents. It’s not just about even document quality. It’s really about enabling leaders to make good decisions.”Iwona Wilson · ~14:40

From Deliverables to Decisions

If compliance isn’t confidence, what changes? Iwona is careful about attribution first: much of this comes from Robert Cooper on stage gate and from decision science, now taught as decision quality and promoted by the Society of Decision Professionals. Then she names the shift: most organizations structure projects around deliverables, templates and checklists, and the decision gate process asks them to structure around decisions instead. That single reframe changes what a team is asked to produce.

“The only reason we have phases is to prepare you for the next decision you need to make. The only reason you’re asked to produce deliverables is to enable some kind of decision.”Iwona Wilson · ~19:50

1. Attribution, unprompted: stage gate from Dr. Robert Cooper; decision-making and opportunity framing from decision science, “which we really call now decision quality, promoted by organizations like the Society of Decision Professionals.”~18:30
2. What leadership is actually there to understand at a gate: the decision, the options considered, where the information came from and whether it’s current, the value, the trade-offs, the logic behind the recommendation, and the commitment being asked of them. The six dimensions, introduced in passing.~21:00
3. The failure mode named: “those organizations that still run the gate reviews heavily focused on activities and deliverables often lose the focus of what’s the intent of the gate review.”~22:00
4. Orion asks the practitioner’s question: is the gate decision always proceed / recycle / hold / stop, or do secondary decisions get brought to a gate?~22:20
5. The minimum-work principle. “What’s the minimum amount of work that we need to do to answer the main question at gate one? It’s not about doing all possible deliverables that we’ve ever done in our life.”~25:15
6. The Fort Myers land analogy arrives (a block of land in Florida while you live in Oregon) and never leaves the episode.~25:45

“Ultimately, at every decision gate an organization is making two decisions. The first is: are we ready? Have we done what we said we would, assured the deliverables, answered the key decisions, tested the assumptions? And the second is: do we want to proceed? Which is more a business decision, given the market, given our strategy, given the current pricing, given what else is going on.”Iwona Wilson · ~28:15

Where Projects Are Won or Lost

Orion had planned to ask which decision matters most. The Florida analogy makes him rethink the question, and Iwona answers the version he didn’t quite ask. Everyone points at FID because that is the decision that goes public and releases the money. Her position is more precise than “the early stuff matters too”, and it is the sentence her book is named after.

“All decisions are equally important, but not all decisions have the same consequences. All decisions are very important, and they need to be answered. If they are not answered consciously, they’re answered unconsciously, through assumptions.”Iwona Wilson · ~32:15

1. Why everyone believes FID is the most important gate: it’s when the project becomes public, when the most funding is released, and when the decision is treated as irreversible.~31:20
2. The reframe (equal importance, unequal consequences) and the assumptions that fill the gap when a decision isn’t made consciously.~32:15
3. Cheapness of change as the real argument: “when you’re gonna change your mind, change directions, new information is gonna become available, making changes at that stage is way cheaper than committing to change once you’re on the plane moving your family to Florida.”~33:40
4. The payoff for doing early work well: a far more confident FID, with a clear story of the options considered, the target outcome and how the decision was made. “So it’s easy to create the story for the public: why do we think this is the right thing to do?”~34:30
5. Orion’s counter-point, which she accepts: killing a project in assess is not wasted work; it tells the organization something worth knowing. “It helps me know where I’m gonna be spending my life and where to invest more energy.”~30:00

When Gate Reviews Become Theater

Two practical questions from Orion, aimed squarely at the executive listening. First: how do I set my team up with this mindset, when most engineers are deeply process-focused? Second, and sharper: how do I spot when a gate review looks healthy and isn’t? Iwona is explicit that she doesn’t run gate reviews (her work is upstream, framing opportunities and setting teams up for them), which is precisely why her warning signs are behavioural rather than procedural.

“How do we provide this grounding presentation? Is everything super polished? Do people ask questions? Do they challenge assumptions? Or do they just accept everything without any challenge?”Iwona Wilson · ~41:20

1. Know your role first: what the organization is for, what it expects from its projects, and whether you are the owner initiating projects or a party executing them. The answer changes everything downstream.~36:10
2. The structure and agenda of the meeting itself “has a lot to do with how we establish a safe and also brave space for discussion.”~41:00
3. Warning sign: at a second gate review, someone names a stakeholder who has never come up before. “Then you might know that probably stakeholder engagement have been done too late.”~42:10
4. Warning sign: the meeting is mostly about how many documents are done and what their status is, rather than a conversation that improves the decision leadership is about to make.~42:30
5. What a healthy team can do on demand at a gate: explain what the opportunity is about, name the major value driver, state the assumptions behind the selected option, and identify the biggest risk.~42:00
6. The test for whether governance is working at all: “are leadership teams getting information that gives them clarity and confidence to approve those projects, so they can move forward, and kill those projects that are just badly framed projects?”~38:45

“There’s a lot that you can listen to and just watch, by listening to the quality of those conversations. And those warning signs might lead to a false confidence about the project.”Iwona Wilson · ~43:00

The Groan Zone

The longest and best stretch of the episode. Iwona explains why a traditional meeting is the wrong instrument for framing a complex opportunity, brings in Sam Kaner’s research on group decision-making to name the messy middle, and defends discomfort as a design feature rather than a facilitation failure. Then she does something unusual on a governance podcast: she describes how she and her husband run the same process at their own kitchen table, with Post-it notes.

“An opportunity framing workshop can be really messy, and can be painful, and they can be uncomfortable. But this is the cost of alignment.”Iwona Wilson · ~49:00

1. Sam Kaner’s three-part structure: diverge (invite opinions and questions); then somewhere in the middle, tension; then converge (narrow the thinking, plan the action, make the decision).~45:50
2. The groan zone, and what leaders do when they hit it. “It gets messy. People feel the disagreement, discomfort… So what they do that moment, they say, ‘Well, let’s stop. Let’s schedule the next meeting for next week.’”~46:40
3. The cost of avoiding it: “that’s why strategy meetings often take three months. If they could actually take one day or two days.”~47:20
4. The claim that makes the discomfort worth it: “those teams that are able early on to go through those difficult conversations, the conflicts, those teams tend to execute faster with less surprises.”~47:50
5. Orion connects it to forming, storming, norming, performing, and asks whether a conflict-avoidant team can even reach a good decision. Iwona’s answer: in the assess phase you don’t have a team yet, so the model applies less than you’d think.~49:20 → ~53:30
6. The kitchen table method: “We take Post-it notes, me and my husband. We don’t sit opposite to each other. In fact, we don’t even look at each other, and we quietly write down what are some of the issues, questions, and concerns that we see in this coming opportunity.” Then they categorize, then they walk the wall. “We’re trying to get our thoughts out of our heads and make them visible on the wall.”~51:30
7. Why framing is avoided in siloed organizations (different functions, different priorities, no willingness to come together) and why doing it consistently changes the culture rather than just the project.~53:50
8. Challenger. Orion asks about the O-ring and the management override of the people on the ground. Iwona: “If people down on the ground are not invited to express their opinions, that is gonna impact decision-making. That is gonna often show up later on as a surprise that could have been prevented.”~57:45
9. Her recommendation, stated flatly: “my recommendation is that every project has an opportunity framing workshop”, with operations, execution, regulatory, community, project controls, project management and HSE experience all in the room early.~58:20 → ~1:00:00

“If people don’t feel like they can contribute, they begin to disengage. They lose the trust in the process. They lose the trust in the governance, and then they often leave.”Iwona Wilson · ~55:40

Six Dimensions of Decision Quality

Orion admits he doesn’t know what the six dimensions are and asks whether he should have. Iwona walks the decision quality wheel one dimension at a time, and pre-empts the objection she always gets, which is that all six are obvious.

“A lot of people listen to those dimensions and they say, ‘Iwona, this is such common sense. Why are you even telling me this?’ Because it is so much common sense. And I often say that the biggest challenge is if the common sense isn’t applied early enough.”Iwona Wilson · ~1:02:20

The rule · a decision is only as good as its weakest dimension

1. What the wheel is for: it is a method you can use to measure alignment across the six dimensions before a major decision is made, or soon after, to check the quality of the one you made.~1:02:40
2. The six, in her order: appropriate frame, creative alternatives, relevant information, values and trade-offs, sound logic, commitment to action.~1:02:45 → ~1:03:40
3. The weakest-link rule. “So the quality of decision is as good as the weakest.”~1:03:50
4. The two ways it breaks. “You might understand the trade-offs. You might understand where the information comes from. But if there’s no commitment, nothing happens.” And in reverse: “You might even have a commitment, but if you have poor quality information, if you’re making wrong assumptions, the quality of that decision will be really low, and the impact it will have will be damaging.”~1:04:00
5. The commitment question, made concrete: “who are the key stakeholders that need to be involved? What amount of commitment is required to make that decision stick?”~1:05:50
6. Where else it works: “you can actually get together with your team in any function, whatever decision you’re gonna make, and just go over those six and discuss it with your team before you make a decision or soon after.”~1:04:40

The Takeaway & the Billion-Dollar Math

Orion offers his own takeaway first: that decision-making can’t live only at the gates, and that the real prize is opportunity framing bubbling up organically through the rest of the organization. Then he asks Iwona for hers, and closes the loop by putting a number on the stakes.

“You need to aim to create some sort of language fluency across different functions, so we all speak from the same hymn sheet and we understand the decision gate process language. And you also need a framework for decision-making that people trust, that empowers individuals inside those teams to voice their opinion, and enables decision-makers to make good, confident decisions.”Iwona Wilson · ~1:08:10

1. Iwona’s takeaway: mindset, language fluency, and a framework people trust.~1:07:40
2. Orion’s framing of the gravity: “something we probably should have told people in the beginning.”~1:08:50
3. The upside argument: getting decision-making right “could make a huge difference between an organization surviving or not, in many ways.”~1:09:45

The Capability Gap

This is the exchange the episode takes its name from. Orion puts the question that had been on his list all along: everybody in major capital projects says they have a stage gate process, so why do we keep seeing billion-dollar surprises? Iwona’s answer is the sentence the whole conversation has been building toward, and then she does something better than restate it: she describes the two opposite ways process maturity goes wrong.

“Companies do have stage gate process in place, but they still experience project overruns, cancellation, or they create projects with not enough value based on what they wanted. And that is happening because having a process in place is not the same as having capabilities. That’s the biggest misconception in this industry.”Iwona Wilson · ~1:33:10

1. When companies actually call. “Many companies ask about stage gate process usually after something major happens, after a major overrun, or some big public issue, or investor pressure or community pressure, or change of leadership, or some operational underperformance that happens over a long time.”~1:34:40
2. The distinction, named. “That’s usually when they begin to see there is a difference between having an approval system and having a decision-making system.”~1:35:10
3. The knowledge gap between the mature majors and the fast-growing companies that have never developed a project: the ones who “tend to run into execution, skip stakeholders alignment, skip option analysis, and are often not clear around the real value of what they’re trying to achieve.”~1:35:40
4. Orion’s good question: can you backslide on capability while keeping the process? Which opens the second failure mode.~1:36:40
5. The over-developed end. “A lot of them, with well-defined stage gate process, develop so much in the process that the process gets very bureaucratic”: massive document production, impossible gate requirements, excessive approvals, lengthy decision cycles. “And then the conversation on the project team, rather than how can we improve decision quality, is all about how can we pass the gate.”~1:37:30
6. What that does to people: “people begin to lose trust in the process, they detach, and they produce documents to ensure compliance as opposed to create clarity.”~1:38:30
7. The best-kept secret. Opportunity framing “is usually only known by the top companies in oil and gas, Chevron, Shell, Woodside”: companies that have matured their stage gate for three or four decades and use framing “not just as a best practice, but as a mandatory approach to start the initiatives.”~1:38:50
8. Outside those organizations: “teams rely on individual experiences. They assume alignment. They don’t test the alignment. They call assumptions givens. They don’t challenge them.”~1:39:50
9. Why stage gate emerges at all: “most organizations really started stage gate process because they started looking at more than one project. And when you have more than one project, you really need to be cautious where you’re going to invest.”~1:42:20
10. Orion’s aside on organizations that wait until they’re big enough (“the 10,000 employee organization definitely started the stage gating before they reached that size”) and Iwona’s reply for the smaller companies: leverage the principles now rather than waiting.~1:41:00 → ~1:43:00

“Move from developing faster to developing smarter. That’s really what I think: that’s where the opportunity is.”Iwona Wilson · ~1:43:00

The Big Ideas

Three ideas carry the episode. Sketched here the way a framing facilitator would whiteboard them at the front of a room, plus a fourth, the decision quality chain, drawn in chapter 08 where it belongs.

From the Bonus Episode

The companion episode turns from governance to the people who will inherit it. Orion asks what advice Iwona would give a student watching who wants into this space, and the answer has nothing to do with software or certifications. Quotations below are her own words, lightly condensed, with approximate positions in the full recording; the split between the main and bonus cuts is Orion’s edit, so a line’s exact position in the published bonus will differ.

“Seek opportunities where you can polish your critical thinking skills. This is what I love the most about opportunity framing, where people see there is a distinction between a given and an assumption. When people see that actually a lot of the stuff can be negotiated.”Iwona Wilson · bonus material, recording ~1:11

Quote Bank

The best on-the-record lines, gathered in one filterable place. “Highlight” marks the lines most worth scrubbing back for. Quotes are lightly condensed with meaning untouched; timestamps are approximate positions in the full recording.

Bookshelf & Links

Everything recommended in the episode, plus where to find the people and the show. Also collected on The Major Project Bookshelf.