Andrew Harnik/AP

White House press secretary Sean Spicer calls on a member of the media during the daily press briefing at the White House on Tuesday, May 30, 2017, in Washington.

President Trump’s “covfefe” moment says it all.

Early Wednesday, the president had tweeted what appeared to be an incomplete thought, ending with a nonsense word: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.”

After his apparent mistake sent the political universe into a day of jokes, Trump turned it into another “look at me" moment, tweeting: “Who can figure out the true meaning of ‘covfefe’ ??? Enjoy!”

At a time of turmoil at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue – with a press secretary appearing grim-faced and stressed and a communications director having tendered his resignation – “covfefe” showed who’s really in charge of White House communications: Trump himself. His messaging staff is just riding in the chase car.

“Ultimately, the best messenger is the president himself,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Tuesday (pre-covfefe).

That suggests a Herculean assignment for those tasked with speaking for the president. Even in the best of times, White House communications is a high-wire act, with scores of aides working to advance the president’s agenda, keep the team “on message,” and wrangle an unruly press corps.

When a major investigation involving a special counsel enters the picture – see presidents Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, and now Trump – a new kind of communications strategy is called for: one that walls off questions about investigations from the routine issues of the day.

With Trump, the challenges increase exponentially. He is new to governing, and doesn’t have that muscle memory to fall back on when major distractions encroach. He is understaffed, both in his communications team and throughout his administration. And he is prone to going off-message and undermining his spokespeople, both in media interviews and on Twitter.

News reports have pointed to White House challenges in finding good people willing to fulfill key roles, but there’s another issue: The Trumpian culture is to keep the team small. He ran both his businesses and his presidential campaign that way. In government writ large, holding back on hiring has also furthered the Trumpian goal of “deconstructing the administrative state.”

Then there are the multiple Russia investigations, a story of international intrigue that brings near-daily developments.

“It’s an elaborate running story and every day it builds on itself, everyone finds a new person, a new angle, a new investigation, a new leak,” says Stephen Hess, who advised former presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, and is a scholar on governance at the Brookings Institution. “These folks don’t really know how to stop the leaks.”

Mr. Spicer has probably suffered more public humiliation than any White House press secretary in history, from Melissa McCarthy's parodies of him on "Saturday Night Live" to slights at the hands of Trump himself. 

Republicans, not surprisingly, have sympathy for Mr. Spicer.

“I don’t think that you need to fire Sean Spicer,” says Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “You need to enlarge the comms shop. Find talent who can come in and are loyal.”

“The news is just moving faster than ever,” says Mr. O’Connell. “And you have a boss who likes to change subjects in a heartbeat. This is a very, very hard job, no matter who you are. But there still needs to be more strategic planning, because the better the strategic planning, the better the execution.”

Even Mike McCurry, one of former President Bill Clinton’s press secretaries, offers a bit of succor for the incumbent.

“The poor guy hasn’t had many breaks,” says Mr. McCurry, now a professor of public theology at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington. “And it’s impossible if you have only an audience of one that counts.”

McCurry also offers sympathy for Trump’s decision not to bring along Spicer, a devout Roman Catholic, when he met the pope, says McCurry. “I felt sorry for that. There are very few perks with all the hardship that goes with the job. But you deserve a few of those.”

'You can't go to war with the press'

Speaking more broadly about the job of White House press secretary, McCurry lays out the basic challenge: serving both the president and the press corps.

“You will rarely keep both sides of that equation happy, but you’ve got to have the trust and confidence in both sides of that adversarial relationship in order to make the job work,” he says. “If it gets out of balance, you’re probably not going to be successful.”

McCurry is widely seen as being among the best to have held the job – even as he navigated the Monica Lewinsky scandal. His formula involved creative deflection and a quick wit.

“Telling the truth, slowly” is one of his better-known explanations for how he avoided lying.

“My general rule was, you have to keep people aimed toward the truth and you can’t deliberately deceive,” he says. “But sometimes you have to be artful in the way in which you provide information.”

McCurry doesn’t want to comment on the current White House, but he does offer this general advice: “You can’t belligerently go to war with the press. It’s an adversarial relationship, but it only works if it’s an amicable adversarial relationship.”

Spicer – attacked and attacking 

Spicer has had a longstanding relationship with Washington media, going back to his days as a strategist and spokesman for the Republican National Committee and before that, handling communications for the House Republican Conference and public affairs for the US trade representative.

Taking on both the communications and press secretary jobs for Trump has no doubt been the challenge of a lifetime. Trump’s original choice for communications director, Jason Miller, resigned before Inauguration Day over a personal matter, and Spicer did the job until Mike Dubke came in on March 6.

Mr. Dubke stayed largely behind the scenes, and on May 18 offered his resignation. Besides Spicer and his principal deputy, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, senior Trump advisers and Cabinet secretaries have taken turns speaking for the boss on television, and in briefings.

After five weeks in office, Trump gave himself a middling grade – “a C or a C+” – for messaging, even as he awarded himself an A for “what I’ve actually done” and an A+ for effort.

That assessment was seen as a slam on his staff, especially his communications team, and rumors of Spicer’s imminent firing or resignation have become routine. Other reports show Spicer moving to a more behind-the-scenes role while Ms. Sanders would do more on-camera work.

On Tuesday, when Spicer was asked whether Trump was happy with White House messaging, his answer was “yes, but” – and turned the question into an attack on the media.

“I think he's very pleased with the work of his staff,” Spicer said. “I think that he is frustrated, like I am and like so many others, to see stories come out that are patently false; to see narratives that are wrong; to see quote-unquote, ‘fake news.’ ”

When asked for an example, he named an erroneous report about Trump not listening to the simultaneous interpretation during the recent G7 summit in Italy. (When the truth came out, that story was corrected.)

Spicer then ended the briefing abruptly. The next day, he appeared before the press, off camera, for just 12 minutes.

How humor can help

Gone are the days when Trump could pose as his own publicist – as he did in the 1990s, calling reporters as “John Miller” or “John Barron” to discuss his personal life and business prowess.

Now Trump is consumed by the business of the presidency, and even if Spicer thinks Trump is his own best messenger, that’s not realistic on a daily basis. Suggestions that Trump might do away with daily briefings by a spokesperson, and hold a press conference himself every two weeks are also unrealistic, say experts on media-White House relations.

Every day, most questions from the press are predictable, and more efficiently handled in a group setting rather than in individual contacts between the press office and reporters.

Peter Fenn, a veteran Democratic communications strategist, blames Trump for the problems with his press shop.

“This White House communications operation is not organized, is not disciplined, and is not rational,” Mr. Fenn says. “And it starts at the top.”

McCurry credits humor with getting him through his toughest moments as Clinton’s press secretary.

“When I got stuck, humor was the only thing left in your toolbag,” he says. “One time, after the 80th straight question on Monica Lewinsky, I used a line someone else gave me. I said, ‘Look guys, you’ve got me double-parked in the no-comment zone.’ ”

“Everybody laughed. Then we moved on to the next subject. If you don’t have the ability to laugh at the absurdity of it all, then it’s going to be very grim.”

Issa Al Awamleh/WFP

Jordanian and Syrian trainees share ideas for new business ventures in the classroom of a WFP-sponsored program in Amman, Jordan, that promotes entrepreneurship, in April, 2017.

Eyad Mohammed has become an expert at waiting.

After fleeing Quneitrah in southern Syria four years ago, Mr. Mohammed waited months to find housing for himself and his pregnant wife in Jordan. There, he waited six months to be granted official documents, and now waits each month for $60 in food vouchers to be credited to his food card.

Unable to legally work, the college English major took courses toward a master’s degree in social work at a local university and volunteered for the very aid agencies he relied on. For four years, the 29-year-old Syrian has been waiting for a return to normalcy, to “stand on his own feet.”

Now Mohammed says he has gained independence: his own business.

“For years I was just a number, waiting on the world for handouts,” says Mohammed, now an English instructor at his soon-to-be launched Peace International Academy, which helps fill the educational and language-training gaps left by overburdened Jordanian schools.

“Now I can share my skills and give back to others,” he says. “I can live.”

As part of a new initiative spearheaded by the World Food Programme (WFP), the United Nations is giving educated Syrians and Jordanians training in business and IT skills, equipping and encouraging them to open their own start-ups in Jordan.

The Syrians and Jordanians chosen to participate are either college graduates or stand-out high school graduates who want to be entrepreneurs or have an idea for a business.

The project is part of a shift in approach to the Syrian refugee crisis, away from direct aid and assistance and toward finding a way Syrian families can support themselves while contributing to, rather than taxing, local host communities.

Barriers

Finding jobs for Syrians has long been a sensitive issue in refugee host countries. Countries such as Jordan and Lebanon have long denied Syrians work permits amid concerns that their refugee communities of more than a million people would flood the host labor markets, drive down wages, and create social unrest.

Yet with no political solution in sight and Syrian families falling deeper into debt, UN agencies that themselves face chronic funding shortages are now shifting toward income-generating programs and other initiatives to help Syrian refugees become more self-reliant.

“We have people who are highly skilled coming from Syria, and these people can contribute to Jordan and other host countries,” says Shada Moghraby, a WFP spokeswoman in Amman.

“This is recognition of the need to shift from direct assistance to offering a sustainable source of income for Syrian families.”

Syrians largely rebuffed attempts by Jordan last year to employ them in factories in special industrial zones in the country, with only a few dozen signing up for a scheme to employ more than 100,000. Jordan has opened up limited sectors to its 1.6 million Syrians, namely agriculture and garments manufacturing, with some 45,000 work permits issued.

“We spent years in university, we are not trained to sit in a factory or work on a farm,” says Nawal al Logi, 26, from Damascus, who took part in the UN program.

More than half of Syrians working in Jordan are estimated to work in unregulated sectors such as construction or plumbing, an often-perilous undertaking. Those working illegally risk being deported back to Syria, while employers often withhold wages.

“We looked for legal work that fit our skills and didn’t find anything,” says Ahmad Abushaar, co-founder of Lama Express, one of the start-ups. “We decided, why wait for work that won’t come when we can make it ourselves?”

Loophole

Through the program – part of a series of resilience projects funded by the German government for $3.1 million – the UN and partners have provided 300 Jordanians and Syrians training on how to carry out economic feasibility studies, budgeting, marketing, and data entry and management.

By pairing Jordanian and Syrian entrepreneurs, the UN believes it has found a beneficial and practical loophole in Jordanian labor laws:

• By partnering with Jordanians, Syrians are able to register their companies and enjoy full legal rights – a distinction they could not secure themselves alone as Syrian nationals.

• By creating partnerships, the UN is creating employment for Jordanians as well as Syrians, allaying government’s fears and building bridges between the two communities.

• By unleashing the creativity and skills of Syrians, program advocates say refugees can give back to the community and lessen the strain of the refugee crisis.

“Instead of asking for the law to be changed, we are meeting the law,” says Obeidah Shaqfa, co-founder of Peace International Academy.

Peace International was founded by three Syrians and three Jordanians, an initiative to use the skills of Syrians in tutoring, language classes, and education training.

Founders hope that the initiative will fill in any gaps left by Jordan’s schools, many of which have switched to half-day, two-shift systems to accommodate the influx of 145,000 Syrian students. The initiative also provides assistance to Syrians who have spent years outside the school to catch up.

“We want to step in and provide a step up for Jordanians and Syrians who are falling behind because of this crisis,” says Salam Bara, 28, a teacher and Jordanian co-founder of Peace International.

Others have chosen to merge the humanitarian and business sectors.

Another joint venture is Lama Express, an online shopping and logistics company that delivers to the home. The initiative partnered with the Molham Team, a Syrian-run NGO that provides medical and emergency assistance to Syrians both within and outside Syria.

As part of its partnership with Molham, Lama Express agreed to devote a percentage of all sales to the NGO. In return, its partnership with a non-profit allows it to import goods without paying customs, a competitive edge enabling it to sell below market price.

“We are both generating income for Jordanians and Syrians and giving something back to the most vulnerable Syrians,” says Abdelaader Abu Namous, a 21-year-old Jordanian and Lama Express co-founder.

“We are realizing that our future as Syrians and Jordanians is one.”

Changing sector?

Any shift in the refugee relief sector from emergency aid to resilience projects comes as refugees face worsening economic prospects. With 80 percent of Syrian refugees living outside camps and residing in urban communities, Syrian families are falling deeper into poverty.

As of late 2016, over 93 percent of Syrians in Jordan are living under the poverty line, with incomes of $88 per person per month or less, according to the UN Refugee Agency. Some 75 percent of Syrian households are in debt, owing on average $1,000 in unpaid rent. In Lebanon, the numbers were similarly bleak: 91 percent of Syrian households are in debt, owing an average of $940, while 70 percent live below the poverty line of $115 per person per month.

Other agencies seeking to promote refugees’ resilience have attempted to provide vocational training for Jordanians and Syrians as electricians, car mechanics, plumbers, and factory welders

Yet encouraging Syrian refugees to open their own businesses marks a first in the region – and a bold step the UN believes can limit Syrians’ reliance on aid hand-outs.

With the success of the first German-funded round of the program, and with many businesses getting off the ground, the WFP and UN are now looking to other donors to broaden the program to include more beneficiaries across Jordan and to link existing startups with private sector investors.

In future phases, UN program officials hope that the Syrians could use their skills to work remotely for European IT companies – again, avoiding the red tape of local work permits.

If entrepreneurship holds the key, many Syrians say they are ready to end the waiting.

“We are tired of hand-outs,” Mohammed said.

“If we can work, then we can live.”

Three years after state-appointed officials began piping contaminated water to households in Flint, eventually triggering a national outcry, another drawn-out fight over water management is roiling the Great Lakes state.

This time the battle is over the bottling of Michigan groundwater by Nestle, the Swiss multinational food company. Nestle is seeking permission to extract more water from an existing well about 100 miles from Flint, for sale in the Midwest. As long as it passes review, the expansion would only incur a nominal permit fee, to the dismay of critics who argue that Michigan is handing over its natural resources to a corporation for a song.

There is no direct link between Flint’s municipal water crisis and Nestle’s pumping permit. But the emotions stirred by the mismanagement in Flint, and concern over how regulators failed to stop it, have combined to make Nestle a lightning rod for environmentalists and a potential test case for how that most basic of natural resources – groundwater – should be managed.

“Flint has changed the conversation,” says Liz Kirkwood, director of FLOW, an advocacy group in Traverse City, Mich., that has contested Nestle’s application.  

In fact, officials in Osceola Township near the Nestle plant voted in April to deny the company a zoning permit to build a booster station so that it could handle additional flow from its wells. Nestle, which hopes to nearly double its permitted flow to 400 gallons per minute from its White Pines well, is appealing that decision.

Although bottlers like Nestle don’t use nearly as much water as farms or factories, the dispute is calling attention to how water is regulated in the US. State laws typically offer wide latitude for property owners to pump groundwater for personal or business use.

Nestle has argued that its increase wouldn’t put the environment at risk. Still, the company seems to concur with critics on one point – that the Flint crisis has altered the zeitgeist here.  

“What happened in Flint is a tragedy … we feel frustration about this,” says Nelson Switzer, chief sustainability officer for Nestle Waters North America. He points out that Nestle and other companies have donated bottled water to the city, which he visited in February.

“Water is a passionate issue,” he adds. “People make decisions based on their data and their knowledge, and they make decisions based on passion and their emotional responses.”

Like many well-watered states, Michigan allows a reasonable use of water by landowners and imposes no royalties for its resale. The Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) must sign off on large withdrawals to make sure stream flows and fish populations aren’t adversely affected. The cost to Nestle? A $5,000 application fee, plus an annual $200 water-use reporting fee.

“That’s the real head-scratcher for folks,” says Nick Schroeck, who directs the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center at Wayne State University in Detroit.

He points to the Flint crisis and tensions over municipal fees in Detroit – nearly 18,000 customers faced shutoffs last month for years of nonpayment – as the backdrop to the outcry over Nestle’s right to pump more at minimal cost. “In a region where we are water rich and you have incredible water resources, it seems that the law protects certain users and not other users,” he says.

Debating the impacts – and the fees  

Nestle’s critics also say that, even in water-rich Michigan, environmental risks are greater than Nestle has allowed.

“Based on direct observation of the lowering of the water table ... we believe that these [nearby] wetland areas will likely be significantly impacted by the observed and predicted lowering of the water table at this location,” Christopher Grobbel, an environmental consultant to the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center, wrote in a February comment to the DEQ.

In Michigan and across the US, the typical residential water bill is more about treatment and delivery than the water itself. When it comes to commercial use, some states charge a sliding fee to bottlers for water extraction. In Maine, Nestle pays towns for water rights and markets the product as Poland Spring, a best-selling brand. Elsewhere, the company has also faced pushback. Last year voters in Oregon's Hood River County passed a ballot initiative to block a proposed Nestle bottling plant amid intense business lobbying.

Environmentalists are divided on the question of whether it makes sense to charge for groundwater, as states impose royalties on oil or minerals. Some are wary of putting a price on such a vital resource. The idea also raises complex questions about what water use should and shouldn’t be taxed in the public interest.

Bottled water represents a fraction of Michigan’s groundwater consumption – less than 1 percent in 2015, compared with 39 percent for agriculture and 26 percent for public waterworks, as in Flint. But its visibility makes its marketers a target in a way that doesn’t apply to cherry farmers.

“We are the largest food and beverage company in the world so attaching our name to something does bring greater scrutiny and attention,” says Mr. Switzer.

An added wrinkle in Michigan is that it belongs to the Great Lakes compact of eight states along with the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec. This commits members to binding rules on managing their common resources, including not diverting water from the Great Lakes basin, which holds roughly 6,000 trillion gallons of water, the world’s largest such resource. But the 2008 compact inserted a loophole for bottlers that allows for its diversion in small containers.

‘There was outrage’

Since Nestle filed its application last July, the DEQ has twice had to extend the period for public comment and to collect more data from Nestle. It has received more than 50,000 comments, including remarks made last month at a hearing in a town near the White Pine Spring where the wellhead is located. At least 450 people showed up for the hearing, which ran past midnight to allow everyone a turn at the microphone.

“There was outrage,” says Ms. Kirkwood, who attended the forum and whose group has collected signatures opposing a well increase. “You have a multibillion-dollar company like Nestle coming to Michigan, basically taking our water for free, and selling it back to us in bottles for millions of dollars in profit. The public is sophisticated and they understand that is not just.”

A spokeswoman for the DEQ says there’s no set time frame for the approval process for Nestle, which is the first under a state law amended in 2008.

Even if state approval comes through, another hurdle for Nestle is the local resistance to its planned booster station for the water flow. Workarounds such as trucking the water are possible, but costly.

“If we are successful with the permitted capacity increase, what you need is a boost along that pipeline,” says Arlene Anderson-Vincent, natural resources manager at Nestle’s plant in Stanwood, Mich.

Lefteris Pitarakis/AP/File

British billionaire Richard Branson poses in 2012 in the window of what, according to the company, would be the world’s first commercial spaceplane. At the time, the company expected commercial flights to begin by 2016; however, they did not.

If all had gone according to plan, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) would be celebrating its 10th anniversary of capturing stunning portraits of distant galaxies, NASA would be hard at work on its dark energy detector, Virgin Galactic would be running two daily tourist flights to the edge of space for just $50,000 a head, and a Russian company would be doing brisk business with its orbiting luxury space hotel.

Of course, that's not how it worked out in reality. Last month, Virgin Galactic made its tenth annual prediction that “next year” it will finally shuttle tourists to space, joining the JWST on the horizon of 2018, and the inaugural mission of NASA's new Space Launch System slipped to 2019. As for that space hotel, don't ask. 

Planning for the future is part of what it means to be human, but cognitive biases, development challenges, and financing conventions conspire to make accurate predictions next to impossible. With forecasting occupying a central role in our greatest ambitions from space to construction, economists and engineers alike are harnessing new tools that let the past inform the future, aiming to make prediction more science and less art. 

At the root of the problem is the tendency to take the optimism generated by a grand idea and overlay that on the execution without applying the critical rigor required to foresee the inevitable hurdles that are likely to complicate the process. Known to psychology for decades, the Planning Fallacy describes the tendency to overstate chances of finishing tasks on time, despite memories of past projects having rarely gone as planned.

“Apparently, people can know the past and still be doomed to repeat it,” wrote psychologist Roger Buehler in his 1995 paper on the topic.

Even the most conservative forecasts can fall prey to evidence-dismissing confidence. Of students asked to lay out a timeline that specifies the dates by which they felt 50 percent, 75 percent, and 99 percent sure they would have finished an academic project, fewer than half actually completed the assignment before the 99-percent prediction.

“Kind of counterintuitively, it’s because people base their predictions too much on imagining and planning how the task is going to unfold,” explains Dr. Buehler, a professor of social psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University. Most folks think through a mental simulation of completing various stages of the task and budget time accordingly.

“The problem with that approach is that those kinds of scenarios tend to be oversimplified, idealized, and don’t take enough obstacles into account,” he continues. Indeed, another study found that only 3 percent of participants considered potential roadblocks during the planning process.

Even when reminded of past failed predictions, people tend to assume those were isolated mishaps, forgetting that there are countless ways for a plan to go wrong but only one way for it to go right.

When individuals gather into groups, the situation gets even worse. “If the team is all invested in the project, getting together and planning it out as a group in fact exacerbated the bias,” says Buehler. Apparently, no one wants to be a Negative Nancy.

It’s basically impossible for an individual to overcome his or her optimism bias, according to megaproject management scholar Bent Flyvbjerg. “These are very basic human mechanisms that apply in all walks of life,” he says. “Experts, including myself, are just as optimistic as laypeople. Just because you know you’re optimistic doesn’t mean that you’re not optimistic.”

Such optimism often leads to underestimating the chance of unknown unknowns derailing your project, so planning experts suggest a technique called reference class forecasting, where project planners learn from past risk by predicting overruns based on how similarly complex projects fared before.

“Independent researchers have found that reference class forecasting is the most accurate forecasting method that you can get,” says Dr. Flyvbjerg. “You cannot be optimistic because you’re taking out human judgement.”

The aerospace industry in particular could use some new tricks. Virgin Galactic doesn't release public estimates, but according to the US Government Accountability Office’s annual review, NASA’s large project costs have overrun budget by between 10 percent and 50 percent in each of the last nine years, a figure dominated by the ballooning costs of the JWST.

The 2015 NASA Cost Estimating Handbook outlines three prediction models: drawing holistic analogies to previous projects (if the Curiosity Mars rover cost this much, then the next lander might cost this much), calculating relationships between key characteristics and cost (perhaps doubling the mass doubles price), and building up itemized costs (this much for labor, this much for parts).

But when you’re attempting the unprecedented, be it space tourism or a Pluto probe, how do you build data-based models? 

“That is more difficult, but not impossible,” says Flyvbjerg. “People often think of their projects as more unique than they actually are.”

Not one to back down from a challenge, NASA in 2013 and 2014 developed the Technology Cost and Schedule Estimating (TCASE) software, which uses reference class forecasting tenets to predict the most uncertain of undertakings: creating new technology. Mining a database of over 3,000 past technology development projects, the program's creators isolated a handful of characteristics that showed predictive power, such as technology area and a classification scheme known as Technology Readiness Levels, or TRLs, which go from 1 (physically conceivable on paper) to 9 (mission proven).

Such tools formalize techniques that have proved effective, according to former ESA program manager Alan Thirkettle, who oversaw the development of the European ISS components. He describes a budgeting process that has long incorporated reference class forecasting type thinking, but one that may have varied between managers and facilities. 

TCASE is just one of a suite of models, and how successful they’ll prove remains to be seen. The 2016 GAO report congratulated NASA for slowing budget creep in recent years, but attributed it only in part to new project management tools, with the rest of the credit going to rising baseline estimates that hide percentage-wise growth. 

What’s more, TCASE applies only to technologies in the early development stage. This period may be the most uncertain, but it counterintuitively accounts for less than a fifth of total development resources. A meta-study of a dozen NASA missions found that costs tend to explode toward the end, with nearly half of the total dedicated to moving a technology from TRL 7 (space-ready prototype) to launch.

Mr. Thirkettle says this trend is standard, likening spacecraft development to building an electric car. Even if inventing long-range battery tech is tough, actually building the whole car costs much more.  “The system is far, far more expensive than the technology development part,” he says. 

Flyvbjerg suggests another reason, one to which newer organizations may succumb more easily. “Often people get surprised at the end,” he explains. “If people have been hiding the uncertainties, which is very common human behavior, then you will actually have a blowout… where all of a sudden reality hits the project and all the unpleasant, hidden things appear.”

These unavoidable features of the development cycle combine with cognitive bias to make even the best-laid plans go awry. But to make matters worse, even if reference class forecasting could roughly estimate the chance of unknown unknowns cropping up, it's hard to get advance funding for what-if scenarios. 

"Historically you can say on the average project you might get somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of surprise that you just couldn’t foresee," says Thirkettle, but "you can't say give me an extra so many million because I may get a launch failure." Available money tends to get spent, so any rainy-day funds have to be carefully earmarked. 

This paradox means that even though planners may expect delays, initially authorized plans often don't reflect that wisdom, making them closer to a best case scenario than a firm promise.

And space just exaggerates that challenge. "You tend to be fairly close to the state of the art so you can get surprises no matter how much discipline you try to put into things," Thirkettle says. 

Jonathan Tichler/Metropolitan Opera via AP

This 2009 image released by the Metropolitan Opera shows The Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center Plaza in New York. The Met recently completed its 50th anniversary season at the location in an atmosphere of continuing uncertainty about the future of opera in the United States.

Those looking for good news about the future of opera in America found it an unusual spot this May: Hollywood's global box office report. Along with "Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2," "Beauty and the Beast," and the "Fate of the Furious," the Top 10 featured the Metropolitan Opera's "Der Rosenkavalier."

On May 13, the Metropolitan Opera ended its 2016-17 season with Franco Alfano's semi-obscure "Cyrano de Bergerac." But in many ways, the true final production of the season was the matinee of Richard Strauss's far more famous work, "Rosenkavalier," which took place earlier that same day – and which was simultaneously broadcast to movie theaters around the world.

"Rosenkavalier," a bittersweet comedy that premiered only three years before the outbreak of World War I, is full of the zeitgeist of the period in which it was written. Fears associated with the fading of old social norms and doubts about an unknown future permeate the opera, themes explicitly brought out by director Robert Carsen and driven home by operatic superstars Renée Fleming and Elīna Garanča, who both announced that they would be retiring from the opera's two lead roles after this production in favor of new and unknown repertoire. 

It was a topical artistic choice for the close of the season celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Met's move to its current home in Lincoln Center. But despite the celebratory mood at the Met, continuing low ticket sales and a general American apathy toward the opera has left many to wonder whether the Met will make it to another golden anniversary. And as the largest and arguably the most important opera house in the United States, what happens to the Met has significant implications for what happens to the art form in the rest of country.

"Opera, from an artistic point of view, is stronger than it's ever been, in many ways," says Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager. "The struggle for opera has to do with the transition from an aging audience to a new one."

Despite higher performance standards than ever before, ticket sales at large companies like the Met simply can't cover costs by themselves – particularly with new audience members tending to buy single tickets rather than subscription packets. Unlike thriving opera companies in Europe, American companies don't receive enough government funding to make up the difference, and the age of dependably wealthy patrons spending big bucks to fund opera houses has been over for decades.

The news isn't all bad, however. According to Mr. Gelb, more first-time ticket buyers came to the Met last season than ever before, and the Met's "Live in HD" broadcasts to movie theaters have seen success as well. "Rosenkavalier" wasn't even the Met's highest-grossing opera of the season: That honor went to its March performance of "La Traviata," with Sonya Yoncheva.

"This is a public art form ... and as long as we have the public, the art form will survive and thrive," says Gelb. "But it's our job to make sure the public is there."

Through programs like the "Live in HD" transmissions and partnerships with educational and artistic institutions, the Met hopes to maintain the public's interest in opera for decades to come. But audience outreach and education is a big burden, especially for smaller companies. And in the US, all other opera companies are small compared with the Met, the budget size and season length of which dwarf even those of its nearest competitors.

Yet those smaller opera companies may actually be the wave of the future, says Douglas Clayton, general director of Chicago Opera Theater (COT) – if they're able to adapt with the times.

"I do think that the model around the giant opera hall is going to fade," Mr. Clayton says in a phone interview. "And I'm hopeful that what we'll see ... is five smaller opera halls instead of one giant, big one."

Across the United States, opera companies are turning to smaller-scale, more unusual works to supplement or even replace the traditional repertoire. But while this can certainly be a cost-saving technique, it also provides opportunities for cultural relevance – bringing communities together and artistically addressing the problems of the modern world. Last season, for instance, COT co-hosted the American premiere of the Philip Glass opera "The Perfect American," an opera based on the life of Walt Disney, and the world premiere of "The Invention of Morel," an opera by Stewart Copeland, former drummer of the English rock band The Police. 

At its best, opera draws on something universal that does not alter with time or trends, says Clayton. "Fifty years from now, society, technology, all those things are going to be so much more advanced than we even know. But the piece of that that I don't think will change – as long as we're human beings, and haven't completely turned into robots – is that we will still have this desire to connect with other people, and to be creative about how we do that."

Despite the artistic differences in their respective companies, both Gelb and Clayton agree that opera in the US does have a future. But both also stress that as an art form it will have to create a living, breathing experience for everyday people and free itself of the elitist perceptions that have held the art form back over the past few decades. It's just going to need hard work – and a lot of it, says Gelb.

"I think what is essential for any opera company, whether it's small, medium, or large, is to find cultural relevance ... and connections in the community to inspire audiences to want to participate," he adds.

Reuters

Members of the Iraqi security forces play soccer in Tikrit in April, 2015, after recapturing the city.

Before the Iraqi city of Tikrit was liberated from Islamic State militants in 2015, its tribal leaders were brought together by trained peace mediators. They forged a pact to rekindle the traditional bonds between Shiites and Sunnis in Tikrit. The key message: “Life can return.” Since then, most of the city’s displaced civilians have returned.

This reknitting of ties in a devastated city is just one reason why the world has enjoyed one of its most peaceful periods. Last year, according to the Global Peace Index released June 1, 93 countries recorded improvements in peace while 68 deteriorated. Using 23 indicators from homicide to military spending, the index found a 10 percent decline in deaths from terrorism and a 6 percent drop in armed conflicts. In two-thirds of the countries, the murder rate – the main cause of violent lethal death – went down.

The Middle East, of course, remains an outlier. Battle deaths in the region are the highest in a quarter century. And the number of refugees and displaced people, mainly from Syria and Yemen, is at a 60-year high – or 1 percent of the world’s population. In general, the 20 least peaceful countries have become more violent.

In sharp contrast, Iceland, New Zealand, and Portugal are the most peaceful countries, according to the index. Europe is the most peaceful region. The United States has slipped in part because its violent crime rate has risen in the past two years.

The index, along with other recent studies that confirm a long-term decline in violence, tries to track “positive peace,” or those ways of thinking and types of institutions that drive harmony, order, honesty, freedom, and justice.

In a recent talk, Nancy Lindborg, president of the United States Institute of Peace, said it is “blindingly clear that we need to think more about getting ahead of the conflict curve if we hope to address rising humanitarian and security challenges, so we’re not reacting after people’s lives have been torn apart.”

The causes of violence vary and are numerous. And scholars have long debated if humans are innately violent or peaceful. But Steven Pinker, the Harvard University scholar and author of the 2011 book “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,” says societies are becoming more “enmeshed” and seeking “a higher good,” resulting in less violence.

Building on his work, a team of Spanish scientists published a study in the journal Nature last year that found a marked drop in violence over the past 500 years. The research estimates about 2 percent of prehistoric humans died from violence. But as societies became better organized, and handed over the control of violence to police, courts, and elected officials, the rate has fallen far below 1 percent. They attribute the decline to better “cultural practices.”

The big shift, however, is a rise in understanding that war and violence are not inevitable and that pursuing peace – the active kind – is not a futile exercise. Places like Tikrit are more at peace because enough people practice those truths.