Complex Management training in LucerneA struggling project: when does perseverance become a management trap?

When a project runs into repeated difficulties, continuing can seem just as reasonable as stopping. For SHR's “Management complexe” programme, this raises a precise question: how can managers reassess a decision without confusing its prospects with the reputation of those who made it?

1. What the literature establishes

Barry M. Staw (1976, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance) experimentally shows that responsibility for an initial decision can increase subsequent resource commitments when results are unfavourable. In this setting, participants therefore respond not only to the project's prospects: their involvement in the earlier choice also matters. This finding highlights a risk in complex management, where the person evaluating an initiative is often the person who championed it.

2. The mechanism: justifying yesterday with tomorrow's resources

Joel Brockner (1992, Academy of Management Review) examines explanations for escalation of commitment, highlighting the role of self-justification. Continuing may serve to defend an earlier decision rather than respond solely to the expected value of future efforts. This is a theoretical review, which does not, however, reduce all persistence to this single mechanism.

3. The hasty conclusion: projects should be stopped sooner

These studies do not establish that a struggling project should be abandoned. Further spending may be justified if new information makes improvement credible or if the future costs of stopping are substantial. The useful distinction is between forward-looking reasons and arguments based solely on recovering what has already been spent. (our executive and employee training programmes)

4. The limits of the evidence and of project reviews

The experimental setting does not reproduce all the interdependencies, contractual obligations and uncertainties of a real organisation. Nor does a theoretical review provide a universal threshold beyond which continuing becomes irrational. In practice, a review committee may itself remain tied to the original choice if all its members have an interest in defending it: adding a meeting therefore does not guarantee an independent assessment.

5. A practical check in Lucerne

In Lucerne, tourism, hospitality, regional financial services and industrial SMEs form a business environment where family ownership, short decision-making channels and strong regional ties can closely associate a decision with its sponsor. Consider a hypothetical example: a hotel continues a digital booking project despite integration difficulties, after its director personally championed it. An exercise suited to SHR's “Management complexe” programme is to record, before the next expenditure, the future costs of continuing and stopping, the remaining expected benefit and an observable condition for reassessment, then have someone uninvolved in the original choice review this document. At the next review, checking whether that condition occurred and whether the planned decision was implemented or explicitly revised provides a way to assess decision-making discipline, without claiming that this alone measures project success. To go further: explore the Complex Management training in Lucerne in the canton of Lucerne, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.

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