Executive Leadership training in LucerneA struggling project: when should a leader stop defending it?
When a project disappoints, the leader who launched it must decide whether to continue, change direction or stop. For SHR’s “Leadership d'excellence” programme, this offers a practical focus: assessing a decision without confusing its future value with its initiator’s credibility.
1. What the literature establishes
Barry Staw (1976, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance) shows, in a resource-allocation experiment, that personal responsibility for an initial choice can encourage further investment when results turn unfavourable. Decision-makers may therefore respond not only to a project’s prospects but also to a need to justify their earlier choice. This finding documents a mechanism of escalation of commitment, not an inevitable tendency among all leaders.
2. Why past expenditure still carries weight
Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer (1985, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes) demonstrate the sunk-cost effect: having already invested money, time or effort can encourage people to continue a course of action. A desire to avoid waste contributes to this effect, even though expenditure that is genuinely irrecoverable cannot be changed by the present decision. A meeting about a project’s future can thus become an implicit defence of past sacrifices.
3. The hasty conclusion: stop whenever results disappoint
These studies do not establish that persistence is irrational. A project may still offer credible future benefits, while stopping it may entail real costs, unfulfilled obligations or the loss of useful learning. The relevant distinction is between arguments about future consequences and those invoking only what has already been spent. (our executive and employee training programmes)
4. The limitations of the evidence and of project reviews
These classic studies draw in part on experimental situations and decisions more narrowly defined than those facing an organisation. They provide neither a universal stopping threshold nor a method for calculating a project’s future value with certainty. In practice, asking only the initiator to present the review may also leave the confusion between project assessment and personal justification unresolved.
5. A practical check in Lucerne
In the canton of Lucerne, tourism, hospitality, regional financial services and industrial SMEs provide settings where short decision-making chains and family ownership can closely associate a project with its initiator. As a hypothetical example, a hotel in Lucerne could review a new booking service by separating sunk expenditure, expected future costs and benefits, and explicit conditions for continuing, changing direction or stopping. As an application exercise for the “Leadership d'excellence” programme, the manager could have a colleague uninvolved in the initial choice review this document and set a reassessment date. Verification would then involve recording the proportion of reviewed projects with criteria written before the decision, followed by checking whether the decision respects those criteria or explicitly explains any departure. 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.
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