How many times do you finish something even though you wish you’d never started it?
We clean our plates even if the carrots are overcooked because they are there and we’ve already started. We do this even though we would never seek overcooked carrots and wouldn’t want them if anyone offered them to us.
We sit in the movie theater and keep watching the movie when we think it’s terrible, even though under no circumstances would we say yes if someone asked, “Would you like to watch forty-five minutes of an awful movie?”
We do the same thing when we continue a project that is off target. We keep going because we’ve already started, not because it makes any sense to continue what we’re doing.
Be prepared to stop—based not on what you’ve already invested but on what you stand to gain by continuing.
Brad runs a high-tech security firm and sees the insides and the decision-making process of all kinds of companies. “The most amazing part of this business is the number of times you’ll hear that a business is concerned that their security is inadequate but that they can’t make a change right now because they’re already paying for another system.”
Brad tells them, “Well, if you’re already paying for another system that doesn’t work, you’re not really paying for security.”
He adds, “I really question when management teams refuse to make a change, even after they acknowledge the need for it, because they don’t want to look bad for having made the wrong decision the first time, or they don’t want to waste the money paying twice for something. When I hear that I wonder if they can ever adapt to their environment, or if they will go down in flames because they had to follow the plan no matter what.”
In experimental settings, people rate the feasibility of continuing the development of a new product based more on its nearness to completion than on the likelihood of the product producing a profit.
Boehne and Pease 2000