Figure 2

Structure of perturbation cascades predicts project performance. (a) Examples of perturbation cascades across projects with increasing tree size and complexity. (b) Cascade size distributions across the dataset. Color code denotes delay rate, measured by the overall proportion of delayed activities across completed activities, from blue (lowest) to red (highest). Dashed line corresponds to power-law distribution with an exponent of 1. We show distributions for the null model (shuffled perturbations) in Figure S8. (c) Comparison between observed power-law exponents of cascade sizes and null model exponents (see Methods). (d) Delay rate as a function of power-law coefficients of cascade sizes, showing a strong and statistically significant negative association (\(\varrho =-0.68\), \(p=0.0089\), Spearman correlation)