Israeli Ministry of Education

The Israeli Ministry of Education is the government institution that encouraged and received a proposed high-school curriculum on judgment and decision making. Its involvement gives the project an institutional purpose and apparent momentum, yet the eventual history of the textbook turns the ministry into the setting’s decisive measure of the gap between a plausible plan and a realistic forecast: the project was completed eight years later, after its initial enthusiasm had waned, and the text was never used.

Institutional Role and Curriculum Project

The project began when Daniel Kahneman persuaded officials in the Israeli Ministry of Education that high schools needed a curriculum devoted to judgment and decision making. He assembled a team of experienced teachers, psychology students, and Seymour Fox, then dean of the Hebrew University’s School of Education and an expert in curriculum development. For about a year, the group met every Friday afternoon, produced a detailed syllabus, wrote several chapters, and conducted sample classroom lessons. These visible accomplishments made the undertaking appear manageable and helped sustain confidence in a completion estimate of roughly two years.

The ministry therefore functioned not simply as a recipient of a manuscript but as the institutional horizon that organized the team’s work. Its early support made the project seem consequential and feasible. At the same time, the team’s progress was judged from within the project itself: the participants saw chapters taking shape, lessons being tested, and a plan that appeared to move forward in orderly increments. Those immediate signs of progress became more psychologically compelling than evidence drawn from comparable projects.

Forecasting Failure and the Outside View

The ministry’s project became the occasion for Daniel Kahneman’s most instructive demonstration of the difference between the inside view and the outside view. While the team was discussing how to estimate uncertain quantities, Kahneman asked every member to submit a confidential estimate of how long it would take to deliver a finished textbook. The estimates clustered narrowly around two years, with a low estimate of one and a half years and a high estimate of two and a half.

Seymour Fox then supplied information from the outside view. Of roughly comparable curriculum teams whose histories he knew, about 40 percent had failed to complete their projects, while the successful teams had taken at least seven years. The statistics implied that the group’s two-year forecast was not a realistic assessment but a best-case scenario. They also implied a causal explanation: if many similar teams failed and the successful ones required so much time, producing a curriculum was probably far more difficult than the team’s immediate experience suggested.

The information was acknowledged but not absorbed. The members could imagine a reasonable plan producing a book in two years; they could not imagine the strange sequence of delays and setbacks that would make the outside statistics relevant to their own work. The base rate was therefore noted and set aside, while the direct experience of good progress retained its authority. The ministry’s project became a textbook case of the planning fallacy: confidence was derived from the internal coherence of the plan rather than from the actual record of similar undertakings.

Perseverance and Institutional Consequences

The team should have abandoned the project that day. A commitment of six additional years to an enterprise carrying a 40 percent chance of failure was not a reasonable investment, yet the warning did not produce an immediately compelling reason to quit. After a brief and desultory debate, the participants resumed work as if the new information had changed nothing.

The eventual outcome confirmed the severity of the warning. The book was completed eight years later, after many unpredictable vicissitudes. By then Daniel Kahneman no longer lived in Israel and had long since ceased to participate, while the original enthusiasm within the Israeli Ministry of Education had diminished. When the text was finally delivered, it was never used. The ministry’s institutional interest thus did not culminate in implementation; the project survived as a manuscript whose completion itself demonstrated how badly its original timetable had underestimated the work.

Lessons for Organizational Decision Making

The episode exposed what Daniel Kahneman called irrational perseverance: when confronted with a choice between abandoning the enterprise and abandoning rationality, the team effectively chose to abandon rationality. Its failure was not caused by a lack of intelligence or effort. The group worked methodically, met regularly, and produced tangible material. The problem was that these local signs of competence concealed the project’s broader statistical risk.

The episode also clarifies why organizations need procedures that protect independent judgment. Before discussion, collecting confidential estimates prevents early speakers and assertive personalities from anchoring the group. More generally, independent judgments allow errors to remain less correlated, whereas open discussion can make members converge on the same mistaken assumptions. The same organizational logic supports reference-class forecasting and the premortem: decision makers should examine comparable cases and imagine that an apparently sound plan has ended in disaster before formal commitment.

The Israeli Ministry of Education episode consequently carries a significance larger than the fate of one curriculum. It shows how an institution can sponsor careful intellectual work while still becoming caught in a collective inside view. A project may look orderly from the room in which it is being built, yet the relevant evidence may lie in the histories of projects that came before it. The ministry’s forgotten textbook stands as the concrete aftermath of that mismatch between imagined manageability and experienced difficulty.