Executive Leadership training in LucerneWhen should you stop a project you launched yourself?
A project is disappointing, yet its manager asks for more time and resources: is this perseverance or difficulty letting go? For the “Leadership d'excellence” programme, this question opens up work on a specific skill: reassessing one's own decisions without confusing responsibility with stubbornness.
1. What the literature establishes: responsibility can strengthen commitment
Barry M. Staw (1976, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance) experimentally studied successive resource allocation decisions following favourable or unfavourable outcomes. In this setting, participants personally responsible for the initial choice committed more additional resources after a negative outcome than those who had not made that choice. This finding highlights a leadership risk: bad news can strengthen the defence of a decision rather than prompt its revision.
2. The mechanism: giving undue weight to resources already spent
Hal R. Arkes and Catherine Blumer (1985, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes) show across several experiments that previous investments of money, effort or time can encourage people to continue an activity. Their analysis highlights, among other factors, the desire not to appear to have wasted the resources committed. Yet an irrecoverable expense is not, on its own, a reason to prefer one future option over another.
3. The premature conclusion: stopping earlier must always be better
These studies do not demonstrate that all perseverance following a setback is irrational. Continuing may be justified by credible future benefits, new information or genuine exit costs. The useful distinction is between a decision based on future consequences and one primarily intended to make the past acceptable. (our executive and employee training programmes)
4. The limits: an experiment cannot supply a universal stopping threshold
Experimental settings simplify decisions and do not reproduce the full complexity of contractual commitments, technical interdependencies or professional reputation. They therefore cannot establish a deadline or spending threshold beyond which a leader should abandon a project. In practice, written stopping criteria can support discussion, but their usefulness remains limited if the manager can redefine them whenever an outcome disappoints.
5. A practical check in Lucerne
In Lucerne, where tourism, hospitality, regional financial services and industrial SMEs include many family-run businesses with short lines of communication and strong regional ties, close relationships could make it difficult to revisit a decision championed by the leader. Consider a hypothetical example: a family-run hotel continues a direct-booking project despite recurring difficulties, while its owner remains its principal advocate. An exercise proposed for “Leadership d'excellence” would involve recording expected future benefits, remaining costs, stopping conditions and a review date before the next investment, then discussing this document with someone who was not involved in the initial choice. On that date, the check would examine the proportion of conditions assessed using documented evidence and any changes to the criteria since they were written: a record of the process, not proof of profitability. To go further: explore the Executive Leadership training in Lucerne in the canton of Lucerne, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Executive Leadership in Lucerne
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