BP's management might have wished that the process was akin to looking up the answer in the back of the book and solving the mathematical equation and writing down the solution directly, but that process is applicable only to trivial and mostly non-competitive problems -- the kind we sometimes get as youngsters in school.
It would be less costly if development proceeded in a linear fashion, from statement of the goal to implementation of a solution, without iteration. The desire for this to be the actual mode of development, as well as the belief that this can always be an actual mode of development, is held mostly by those who have mostly only ever thought about development from afar.
There is a fair amount of this utopic belief, I think, behind the national criticism of BP's failure in the Gulf. Folks who couldn't change the oil in their Prius to save their life without spilling half of it on their garage floor are incredulous that BP can't bring oil up from a mile under the ocean without failure, where failure is defined as the inability to stop a leak of 240 ft x 240 ft x 240 ft of oil into the Gulf of Mexico (100 million gallons) instantly a mile underwater. (Yes, that's a big local mess, but it is not an ocean ending event; crude oil is not Plutonium.) Folks living on the most oil dependent construct mankind has ever created -- the Island of Manhatten -- are shaking their heads, wondering why folks are doing all that dirty drilling business down in the Gulf.
