A slightly different take, its probably more of people failure, the lack of required expertise, skillset, motivation and coordination. People have motivations to do the job to make a living, success of any long term project is rarely the driving factor for most people working on it. People would know ahead of time when a project is going towards the direction of failure, its just how the things are structured. From systems perspective, an unknown system/requirement would be a good example where you build iteratively, a known set of requirements should give good enough idea about the feasibility and rough timelines even if its complex.