Nudge · 2-minute read
The person who launched a failing project is the person least able to stop it — not from stubbornness, but because stopping means admitting the original call was wrong.
In a classic study, business students who had personally made a failing investment decision put far more additional money into it than students who inherited the same situation.
This is escalation of commitment. Pulling the plug would mean admitting misjudgement, so we justify one more round. The fix isn’t to find braver leaders — it’s to move the decision to someone without authorship, or to set exit criteria while everyone is still objective.
The research: Staw (1976), Organizational Behavior and Human Performance.
Adapted from Nudges at Work by Tareef Jafferi, shared in partnership with Happily.ai.
Once you understand something, it becomes very hard to imagine not understanding it — which is why leaders consistently overestimate how clearly their priorities have landed.
When people stop recognising colleagues or sharing ideas, leaders blame motivation. Usually the real culprit is how hard we’ve made the right behaviour.
Organisations slow themselves down by treating easily reversible choices with the same heavy process as irreversible ones.