Perhaps the most cited lesson from Pressman and Wildavsky's (1973) study was their insight into decision points and the importance of control and coordination.Creating jobs through public works and other programs on Oakland required the involvement of state and local authorities; and other federal agencies inevitable become involved too.To get anything substantive done thus required getting a wide range of agencies at different governmental levels to approve key implementation decisions.Pressman and Wildavsky found that the more approvals that have to be granted in order for an action to taken, the higher the likelihood that that action would not be taken. To quantify this point,Pressman and Wildavsky provided an example where thirty decision points have to be cleared, involving seventy separate required agreements before an action can be approved and undertaken. Assuming a .95 probability of approval at each agreement point,Pressman and Wildavsky calculated that the probability of a particular proposal running this bureaucratic gauntlet and actually being implemented is .000395 (1973, 106-107).In other words, when dealing with a dispersed decision-making system, one's chances of getting anything done are low-often astonishingly low- even when most people want to do it. Even if the odds are overcome,getting anything done is going to take a long time. Pressman and Wildavaky estimated that each of those seventy agreements would require one to six weeks to secure, which resulted in an estimate that the Oakland project would face four-and-a-half years' worth of delays. Their estimate proved to be fairly accurate (1973, 106-107).