Careers are trashed and personal lives disrupted.

Even by optimistic estimates, about 75 percent of projects are late, over budget, missing major functionality or canceled outright. So depending on your definition, most of our projects end up somewhere between failure and disaster.

There are several important things to do once you realize that you're facing a disaster in the making, but you shouldn't do any of them until you are really sure that it's an impending disaster you're up against. So the first key to disaster recovery is disaster detection.

Given that so many projects go astray, you'd think that we'd be better at detecting these sorts of problems. Heck, our default assumption about projects should be that they're in trouble. But that's just not the way we're built.

Why is it so hard to know? Well, I've got a few theories.